“This is the second one we’ve seen do this from the Russian side,” said DeAnna Burt, who was chief operations officer at the US Space Force at the time of the incident.
“You have a satellite that then has another satellite within it that then, we believe, is a KK or Kinetic Kill vehicle that would go out and rendezvous with another satellite and potentially harm it or image it or do different things,” she added.
Burt retired in October 2025 and spoke to RFE/RL during a visit to Prague organized by the Aspen Institute. In a wide-ranging interview on January 30, she discussed threats to satellites from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as a shadowy conflict already ongoing since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“We have seen what we would call rendezvous proximity operations, which means…flying around and surveying the other satellite,” Burt said, when asked about the incident last June.
The concern, she added, was “would they release a kill vehicle” or was it “purely surveillance and reconnaissance?” It turned out it was the latter. But it was still alarming, not only due to the risk of collision.
“What you’re seeing in the development here, all of these are tests building up to capability…hypothetically, if I were going to launch a counter space capability, first I’d want to make sure I can acquire targets before I could then strike targets.”
Burt is not the first to warn of such Russian threats.
The previous incident was briefly discussed by the then chief of space operations of the US Space Force, General John Raymond, in comments to Time Magazine in 2020. “The way I picture it, in my mind, is like Russian nesting dolls,” he said. “The second satellite came out of the first satellite.”
In 2024, Raymond’s successor General Chance Saltzman warned of a “Day Zero” if Russia deployed a nuclear weapon in space to destroy satellite capabilities. That year, a claim by the Pentagon that Russia had “likely” deployed an anti-satellite weapon in space was denied by the Kremlin.
More recently, on January 21, an Atlantic Council report said the United States was “unacceptably vulnerable” to such threats and urged a shift to “resilient satellite architectures.”
Burt said this was something that was already a major US priority: “Having the ability to take a hit and to be able to recover…with satellites that are on the shelf ready to launch.”
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