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Soyuz rocket launches a military payload In the early hours of April 17, 2026, a Soyuz-2-1b rocket lifted off from the Plesetsk military launch site with a classified cargo for the Ministry of Defense.
Soyuz rocket launch on April 17, 2026, at a glance:
Around April 10, 2026, Russian authorities issued multiple warnings to air and sea traffic about upcoming rocket launches: one on April 13 and April 29, with launch windows between 21:00 and 23:59 UTC, and another between April 14 and April 30, with an unusually long window between 00:00 and 16:00. As noted by a space historian Bart Hendrickx, the announced danger zones matched known impact sites for the payload fairing of the Angara-1.2 rocket and for the second stage of the Soyuz-2 rocket, either indicating parallel launch campaigns for two vehicles based in Plesetsk or intentionally creating a confusion as a countermeasure against a potential attempt by Ukrainian forces to strike a fueled rocket on the launch pad. According to the statement by the Russian Ministry of Defense, distributed by the official Russian media around 03:00 Moscow Time on April 17, 2026, the Soyuz-2-1b rocket lifted off as planned with multiple spacecraft for the Ministry of Defense. Soon after 02:30 Moscow Time, multiple sightings of what appeared like a rocket ascent was reported in Finland. Around 09:30 Moscow Time, the Ministry of Defense reported that the launch at 02:17 Moscow Time was a success and the spacecraft were successfully delivered into their orbits. The published visuals of the launch revealed a Soyuz rocket with a payload fairing typically used in a combination with the Volga upper stage, however no warning had ever been issued for any area of the ocean normally used for deorbiting of a space tug.  The expected ground track of the ascent trajectory for Soyuz rocket during launch in April 2026. The US Space Force initally catalogued a single object associated with the launch in a 457 by 547-kilometer orbir with an inclination 98.33 degrees toward the Equator. A few hours later a total of three objects were tracked:
Several hours later on April 17, 2026, five objects were catalogued and two NORAD ID numbers were skipped, when the US Space Force registered the following Chinese launch on the same day, indicating that more objects from the Russian launch may have been tracked but not yet listed:
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