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August 8th, 2026
Taking LEO Off the Board: Russian Thinking About Anti-Satellite Warfare is authored by Aaron Stein, President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI).
“The Soviet Union and Russia have invested in anti-satellite weapons to ensure that their nuclear deterrent remains credible. For both the Soviet Union and Russia, the destruction of American satellites was (and is) viewed as part of the country’s broader nuclear war plan and part of the opening salvo in a nuclear conflict with the United States,” Stein writes.
Spurred by an influx of spending for the upcoming Golden Dome space-based interceptor architecture, Stein points out that “Russian planners are increasingly incentivized to further bypass traditional treaty norms and leverage co-orbital nuclear weapons to achieve a catastrophic mass-kill of low-earth orbit tracking networks and space-based defenses.”
Image credit: DIA
Stein explains that the future is certain to feature a more militarized space domain.
For Stein to “take LEO off the board,” means that Russia could leverage a nuclear weapon to mass kill commercial satellites, including US space-based missile defense.
For sure such a tactic would also harm Russian satellites.
“However, given the rapid expansion of targets, the redundancies the US is now building, and the decreasing cost of launch,” Stein observes, “Russian strategists are thinking about how to negate these advantages. The urgency is certain to continue, as the United States continues to explore and invest in space-based missile defense.”
To access the report – “Taking LEO Off the Board: Russian Thinking About Anti-Satellite Warfare” – at:
https://www.fpri.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/web_stein-rsi-may-2026.pdf
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