The Russian government moved swiftly Wednesday to dismiss recent Pentagon accusations that Moscow had launched a new \u201ccounter-space weapon\u201d potentially capable of threatening U.S. military satellites.<\/p>\n
In comments to Russian state media, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov downplayed the allegations from American officials, characterizing them as unfounded speculation Moscow would not dignify with a full response.<\/p>\n
A day earlier, U.S. Department of Defence spokesman Pat Ryder accused Russia of sending up a \u201ccounter-space weapon into the same orbit as a U.S. government satellite\u201d that could be used to attack American spacecraft.<\/p>\n
No evidence substantiating the allegation was provided. Ryder also declined to specify which U.S. satellite may have been placed at risk by the purported Russian weapon system.<\/p>\n
The accusation escalated long-simmering tensions between the U.S. and Russia over the militarization of space and the development of orbital anti-satellite armaments.<\/p>\n
But Ryabkov\u2019s terse dismissal suggested the Kremlin had no interest in being drawn into a tit-for-tat exchange on the issue. His remarks mirrored previous Russian denials of Western claims that it is developing clandestine anti-satellite capabilities.<\/p>\n
Moscow has instead promoted international efforts to ban all weapons from space through a draft treaty at the U.N., though that proposal was blocked by the U.S. last month.<\/p>\n
For its part, the U.S. has maintained a policy stance of not weaponizing space while still pursuing advanced satellite-tracking and rendezvous technologies that could theoretically have offensive applications.<\/p>\n
With such differing perspectives, accusations like the one leveled by the Pentagon this week seem primed to continue roiling the geopolitical space race between the two nuclear superpowers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov downplayed the allegations from American officials, characterizing them as unfounded speculation Moscow would not dignify with a full response.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":406,"featured_media":17984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[281,10917,78,10919,215,339,279],"class_list":["post-17980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-russia","tag-moscow","tag-pat-ryder","tag-russia","tag-sergey-ryabkov","tag-ukraine","tag-un","tag-usa"],"reading_time":"2 min read","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.businessupturn.com\/asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}