For decades scientists have been warning about the critical littering of near-Earth orbit, and military strategists about the inevitable militarization of space. Today the warnings about “weaponization”—the turning of space into a theatre of war—have become a geopolitical reality. Moscow’s closed design bureaux, acting on direct instructions from Russia’s political leadership, spent years developing dedicated infrastructure for orbital attacks and have now moved on to systematic testing of anti-satellite weapons.
Nudol on the space throne
On 15 November 2021, the world saw the consequences of that policy for itself: a Russian direct-ascent interceptor smashed the defunct Soviet satellite Kosmos-1408. According to US Space Command, the explosion produced more than 1,500 catalogued fragments. NASA’s leadership stated openly at the time that the debris cloud posed a lethal threat to the crew of the International Space Station.
That shot was the first successful operational use of Russia’s Nudol system, developed by the flagship of the Russian defense industry, the Almaz-Antey concern. Once the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the Kremlin only accelerated the deployment of this system, designed to “blind” Western military and reconnaissance satellites in the event of a conflict with NATO.
The StateWatch think tank and the United24 Media outlet, having examined a body of non-public internal documents from Russia’s defense-industrial complex obtained from the Cyber Forces of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, have established exactly how Moscow is putting this weapon into series production, which plants are involved in the scheme, and why the key suppliers of components for Putin’s “space weapon” are still successfully evading Western sanctions.
From a Soviet blueprint to a satellite killer
The Nudol system has deep Soviet roots. It is a direct descendant of the fixed-site A-135 Amur missile defense system, deployed around Moscow to protect the city against a limited nuclear strike and placed on combat duty back in 1995.
The project to modernize Moscow’s missile defenses ran for a long time under the codename Samolet-M (its new army designation being A-235). In the course of the work, however, the concept underwent a radical transformation. The Russians abandoned silo basing for their heavy missiles in favour of highly mobile wheeled chassis built by the Minsk Wheeled Tractor Plant. Above all, they gave up on nuclear detonation in the stratosphere and staked everything on direct kinetic impact (hit-to-kill technology).
The A-235 missile defense system
In effect, a missile defense system was repurposed to destroy spacecraft in low orbit (direct-ascent ASAT). This is how the 14Ts033 system was born, with its two-stage 14A042 direct-ascent interceptor—the core of the Nudol program. The lead developer of the munition was the Novator design bureau in Yekaterinburg, the same enterprise that mass-produces Kalibr cruise missiles, aeroballistic missiles for the Iskander system and interceptors for the S-300V and Buk systems (a Buk shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over the Donbas in July 2014).
Chronicle of an assembly line: Kremlin speeds up production
The documents obtained make it possible to reconstruct in detail how Moscow is moving a one-off experimental missile into the status of a series-produced weapon.
The timeline of that production ramp-up reveals some telling details.
- May 2022. Immediately after the start of the full-scale invasion, the deputy chief designer of the Novator design bureau sent an urgent request to the Perm Gunpowder Plant demanding that it prepare capacity without delay for the simultaneous manufacture of components for the 14A042 anti-satellite missile and for the prospective 102A6 missile (the Svyatogor system, 103T6).
- July 2022. Russia’s Defense Ministry and the developers took a joint decision to unify the two systems completely. To save money and time, all the engines, pyrotechnic cartridges, gas generators, steering gear units and sensors were made common to both missiles.
- December 2023. The anti-satellite missile passed its preliminary trials. The Defense Ministry decisions obtained show that by 2023, 15 prototype missiles had been built and 13 test launches carried out, and that the first two missiles had been handed over for trial operation with Russia’s Aerospace Forces. More than that: pressed for time, the customer scrapped the pilot-batch stage altogether and sent the missile straight into series production under the "O1" designation.
- March 2024. In Yekaterinburg, representatives of the Defense Ministry, Almaz-Antey and the relevant plants set a delivery schedule: the first batch of eight combat missiles was to be assembled by July 2025, with a further 12 units to be delivered by November 2026. To close the shortfall in parts, series-production units were officially permitted to be fitted with components manufactured for the parallel research system.
- July 2024. The Russian military command approved an unprecedented decision: to count static firing tests of the engines of the adjacent system as full qualification tests for the 14A042 anti-satellite missile. The reason was mundane—a shortage of materials, money and time.
The anatomy of cooperation: who is building the orbital weapon
The scale of the Nudol program disproves the myth that ultra-complex weapons are created by a couple of isolated state giants. What is really at work is a sprawling industrial cartel bound together by dozens of direct contracts.
The key parties to this cooperation are:
- the Almaz-Antey concern (Moscow)—overall systems management of the project;
- Novator design bureau JSC (Yekaterinburg)—lead developer and assembler of the missile;
- NPO Iskra PJSC (Perm)—design and production of high-power solid-propellant rocket motors, casings and transport-launch canisters;
- the Perm Gunpowder Plant (FKP) and NIIPM JSC (Perm)—manufacture of composite solid rocket propellant, igniter charges and chemical charges;
- Soyuz design bureau JSC (Kazan)—manufacture of high-strength stage casings;
- PO Sever JSC (Novosibirsk) and EOKB Signal JSC (Engels)—precision electric steering drives and high-accuracy pressure sensors;
- Avangard JSC (Safonovo)—production of composite cups and containers;
- Tri-D JSC (Zelenograd)—development and production of three-dimensional woven preforms for rocket motor nozzles.
Swiss chemicals and Chinese stabilizers
The paradox of Kremlin policy is that Russia’s most secret and most ambitious counter-space program is critically dependent on foreign inputs. The Russian chemical industry has proved unable to meet the demand for specific high-purity polymers on its own.
According to the documents, the Perm Gunpowder Plant’s technological cycle for manufacturing solid propellant for Nudol and for parallel systems relies on imports.
- Cellulose acetate. The basic raw material is supplied by the Swiss company Cerdia. For 2025 alone, deliveries to the Perm defense plant amounted to 30 tonnes.
- Centralite II. This specialized gunpowder stabilizer is imported directly from China. The plant’s annual requirement for the compound runs to 180 tonnes.
- Carbon composites. The minutes of a meeting held in March 2024 contain a telling item: NPO Iskra was instructed to find an urgent replacement for UKN-5000 carbon fiber in the 14D807 first-stage motor. That is a direct indicator of a shortage of quality structural carbon fiber in Russia.
A special place in the production chain belongs to Tri-D JSC (Zelenograd, Russia). The company develops and manufactures multilayer, seamlessly woven three-dimensional preforms from quartz, silica and carbon fibers. These are used to form the composite frames of critical assemblies capable of withstanding extreme thermal loads during suborbital flight.
Tri-D is deeply embedded in Russia’s defense industry: its products are regularly contracted by the Votkinsk plant (which builds Yars ICBMs and Iskanders), NPO Mashinostroyeniya, ONPP Tekhnologiya and the Novator design bureau. In 2015–2018 alone, the value of confirmed contracts exceeded RUB 239 million.
Here, though, lies the central legal paradox: Tri-D JSC is currently under sanctions only in Ukraine. Neither the United States nor the European Union, nor the United Kingdom or Japan, has yet included the company in its registers of sanctioned entities. That, in turn, allows the enterprise to buy European three-dimensional weaving machines, synthetic fibre components and industrial chemicals entirely legally, or through intermediaries.
The case for sanctioning the companies behind Nudol
The documentary evidence obtained from Ukraine’s Cyber Forces demonstrates two key realities.
First, Russia is not bluffing when it threatens to destroy communications and imaging satellites over the combat zone. The 14Ts033 (Nudol) anti-satellite system has become a fully fledged series defense order, with combat batches due for delivery by the end of 2026.
Second, the program rests on imported dual-use materials and the unimpeded operation of subcontractors that have spent years sheltering in the shadow of the large state corporations.
The StateWatch think tank and United24 Media have already handed a comprehensive package of evidence to the sanctions authorities at the European Commission. The goal is clear and admits of no alternative: to synchronize the restriction lists, impose blocking sanctions on Tri-D JSC and its beneficiaries, and shut off the supply channels for Swiss cellulose acetate, Chinese stabilizers and carbon materials to Russia.
If Western allies want to make their space infrastructure safe in orbit, Nudol has to be stopped on the ground by cutting off the technological oxygen to Russia’s defense industry entirely.