Russia just stalked the satellite that feeds Ukraine its war images

So why would Russia do this?

Since October 2022, Russia has said it might treat commercial satellites that support Ukraine as legitimate military targets. A senior Russian foreign ministry official set that position out at the United Nations, according to Al Jazeera.

Shadowing a satellite this closely is one way to make that threat feel real, without actually carrying it out. Any satellite can become a weapon just by being crashed into another one.

And it's not only Ukraine's satellites being watched.

Germany's Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, said last year that two Russian satellites, called Luch-Olymp, were tracking two Intelsat satellites used by the German military. Major General Michael Traut, who runs German Space Command, says the same tactic, turned on a huge network like Starlink, could shorten satellites' working lives and degrade service everywhere.

Marco Langbroek, who lectures in optical space situational awareness at TU Delft's Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, says getting this close to another satellite without the owner's agreement is widely seen as something you just don't do, because it's dangerous.

Juliana Suess, a space security researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, says a kinetic attack still seems unlikely for now, because nothing like it has happened before.

But Russia does have a history here.

In November 2021, it blew up one of its own satellites with a missile, and that created a huge field of debris in orbit. It has also tested releasing objects from satellites before. One of those tests, from Cosmos 2543 in 2020, was described by a senior US official as showing the characteristics of a weapon system.

An unnamed Ukrainian official told Axios that Ukraine's military works with ICEYE and uses its imagery, but couldn't confirm whether ICEYE-X36 itself was involved in supporting Ukrainian operations.

Neither the US Defense Department nor ICEYE had said anything publicly about the latest manoeuvres at the time of reporting.

So what don't we know? Whether Cosmos 2612 carries any kind of weapon. Whether this was a one-off warning or the start of ongoing tracking. And whether Russia plans to go further and try to disable or destroy ICEYE-X36.

Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS, describes the gap between the two satellites as bumper-to-bumper.

For now, that's as close as anyone can say for certain they've come.