Russian Spy Satellite Luch Completely Destroyed After Collision with Space Debris

The Russian reconnaissance satellite Luch, also known as Olymp (NORAD 40258), was completely destroyed in its so-called “graveyard orbit.”

The fragmentation of the spacecraft was reported by the Swiss company S2A Systems.

According to analysts, the satellite broke into a large number of fragments as a result of a collision with space debris on January 30, 2026.

It should be noted that the burial orbit is used to decommission satellites after they have completed their work.

However, it is currently unknown whether this incident was the result of a deliberate destruction of the spacecraft or whether it happened accidentally.

At the same time, the Russian side has not commented on this incident.

The spacecraft was launched into orbit in September 2014. Formally, it was classified as a satellite of the Luch series, but it did not belong to the commercial Luch-5 line, designed for retransmission and communication.

The spacecraft’s behavior aroused suspicion from the very beginning: the satellite regularly changed positions along the geostationary belt and remained in close proximity to foreign communications satellites for a long time.

Experts associate such maneuvers with the performance of radio-technical reconnaissance and signal interception tasks.

In 2015, it stopped between two Intelsat satellites, prompting an official protest from the US.

And in 2018, French Minister of the Armed Forces Florence Parly publicly accused Russia of “space espionage” when Luch approached the Franco-Italian military satellite Athena-Fidus to intercept secure signals.

There have been repeated reports that the satellite belongs to the Russian Federal Security Service and was operating exclusively in the interests of the aggressor country’s intelligence services.

Earlier, Militarnyi reported that Russia is developing anti-satellite weapons targeting American billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.

The so-called “area-effect” weapon will be aimed at filling Starlink’s orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density spherical elements, “which can disable several satellites at once, but also creates the risk of catastrophic collateral damage to other orbital systems.”