A record-breaking US astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts were headed for Earth Wednesday in the first space landing since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent tensions between Moscow and the West to Cold War levels.

NASA’s Mark Vande Hei is set to touch down in Kazakhstan’s steppe at 1128 GMT, after setting a new record for the single longest spaceflight by a NASA astronaut by clocking 355 days aboard the International Space Station.

Russia’s space agency Roscosmos confirmed Wednesday that the three-man crew’s automated flight back from the ISS had begun with separation from the space station at 0721 GMT.

Vande Hei is joined by cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov, with whom he blasted off from Baikonur in April last year, and who now holds the record for the longest mission by a Russian at the ISS.

Anton Shkaplerov, who is rounding off a standard six-month mission, is the third member of the returning crew.

The first selections for year-long ISS missions that paired NASA astronauts and Roscosmos cosmonauts were made in 2012.

Relations between Moscow and Washington were in a much better place back then, taking a sharp turn for the worse in 2014 after Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and began supporting separatist forces fighting in Ukraine’s east.

Space was one of the few areas of cooperation between Russia and the West untouched by the fallout.

The ISS, a collaboration among the US, Canada, Japan, the European Space Agency and Russia, is expected to be wound up in the next decade.

Last month Roscosmos chief Dmitri Rogozin, an avid supporter of what Moscow has called a “special military operation” in Ukraine, suggested that Western sanctions targeting Russia in response had put the orbital lab in jeopardy.

“If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from uncontrolled deorbiting and falling on US or European territory?” Rogozin wrote in a tweet last month—noting that the station doesn’t fly over much of Russia.

Rogozin has also traded barbs on Twitter with the now-retired astronaut Scott Kelly, who has been sharply critical of the invasion.

© 2022 AFP