Ukraine accused Russia of the collapse of its space industry
Russia is to blame for the fact that the ambitious project of the Sea Launch cosmodrome, in which Ukraine had a share, went bankrupt due to the disaster in January 2007 of the Ukrainian Zenit rocket with a Russian RD-171 engine, which allegedly contained a foreign object, leading to accidents
A number of Ukrainian experts stated this on the air of the “Secret Front” program, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Thus, rocket and space technology expert Radiy Radutny said on the air of the program that after this the Sea Launch project declared itself bankrupt and was bought out by the Russian RSC Energia.
“The accident led to serious damage to the launch platform, there was a fire, large losses were caused and the reputation of the project dropped significantly. The price of the project dropped significantly and the Russians were able to outbid it. This is a typical raider scheme, when the project is brought to a bad state, becomes cheaper and then the raider buys it back for little money... Just after this accident, the Russians became more active in the market for launch services and quickly agreed with France on the use of their cosmodrome with Russian rockets. Everything indicates that they were ready for such a development of events,” says Radutny.
In addition, the program also said that Russia influenced the termination of the Ukrainian-Brazilian agreements on the compensation of the Alcantara cosmodrome. They say that when Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma was ready to sign the final agreements in 2003, the Russian Federation began military activity near the island of Tuzla.
“At the last moment, when Kuchma flew to Brazil and held high-level meetings on this issue, the Russians began to build a dam, in fact connecting their territory with the Ukrainian island of Tuzla,” said Alexander Musienko, head of the Center for Military Legal Studies.
He also added that this changed the plans of the Ukrainian delegation, which was forced to urgently return to Kyiv, and later the Russian Federation was “forced” to terminate the agreement.
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