THE NEW SPACE RACE: Kazakhstan’s seizure of Russian space assets threatens the Soyuz-5 rocket.

Russia has already spent nearly $1 billion on the development of the new Soyuz-5 rocket and plans for its launch site and ground services. When Ars wrote about the rocket’s development in 2017, it was slated to debut in 2021. Now it is unlikely to debut before at least 2024—and given the current dispute with Kazakhstan, it likely will be delayed much longer into the future.

There are some interesting and complicated politics at play between the two countries. Kazakhstan has nominally been a sovereign nation since 1991, but in the last three decades, it has maintained close ties to Russia and lies well within the Russo-political sphere.

However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to have changed the calculus of this relationship. Namely, Kazakhstan’s president, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, apparently sees Russia’s preoccupation with Ukraine as a window of opportunity to assert greater autonomy for Kazakhstan.

Russia keeps paying a bigger and bigger price for Putin’s stupid war in Ukraine.