Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed on Saturday that his country struck the Progress Rocket Space Center deep within Russia using ground-launched cruise missiles.
“In Russia’s Samara region, one of the key enterprises within Roscosmos—the Progress Center, which was involved, among other things, in electronics production–was hit,” Zelenskyy said on the social media site X. “Flamingo missiles were used. A good achievement.”
The largest city in the Samara Oblast, about 900 km from the Ukrainian border, Samara is home to Russia’s most important manufacturer of rockets. The Progress center assembles the workhorse vehicle for Russia, the Soyuz-2 vehicle, as well as the newer Soyuz-5 rocket. The facility also builds military satellites.
Russia uses the Soyuz-2 rocket, which has a lift capacity of about 8 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, for a variety of civil and military purposes. Notably, it is the principal rocket used for Russia’s human spacecraft launches to the International Space Station.
Already a shortage of Soyuz rockets
It was not immediately clear which facilities at the sprawling Progress facility were damaged. There were some open-source reports that a missile struck a building that houses a clean room for avionics—perhaps a reference to the electronics production Zelenskyy referred to.