Russia's Luch/Olymp Satellites Spent a Decade Parking Next to the West's Comsats

In the spring of 2015, Intelsat found it had a new neighbor. Two of the company’s satellites, Intelsat 7 and Intelsat 901, sat less than half a degree apart in the geostationary belt near 18 degrees west, serving customers on both sides of the Atlantic. Around April 4, a Russian spacecraft stopped at 18.1 degrees west, directly between them. Nobody had told Intelsat it was coming. According to sources who spoke to SpaceNews that October, at times it maneuvered to within 10 kilometers of the Intelsat spacecraft, close enough that company leaders believed their satellites could be at risk.

Intelsat tried to reach the satellite’s owners directly and through the U.S. Defense Department. It got no response. “This is not normal behavior and we’re concerned,” Kay Sears, then president of Intelsat General, the company’s government services arm, told SpaceNews in an October 8 interview. A U.S. Strategic Command spokesman added that the Russian satellite had come within 5 kilometers of another, unnamed satellite on three occasions since launch.

The intruder was catalogued as Luch, launched from Baikonur on a Proton-M with a Briz-M upper stage on September 27, 2014 (September 28 local time). The Luch name belongs to Russia’s legitimate data relay network, the rough equivalent of NASA’s TDRS fleet. The U.S. government calls this satellite Olymp-K, and independent analysts concluded early on that the relay label was cover. What the spacecraft actually did for the decade was move from one Western communications satellite to the , park beside each for weeks or months, and then leave.

In 2023, Russia launched a second one. This is the record of both, built from public reporting, government statements, and the KeepTrack catalog.

Why You Park to a Satellite You Want to Hear

The behavior only makes sense once you think how a geostationary communications satellite is actually used. Most of the interesting traffic flows in two directions. The downlink, from satellite to Earth, is broadcast over a footprint that can cover a continent, and anyone inside that footprint with a dish can record it. Intelligence services have been doing that from the ground for decades. The uplink is different. A ground station sends its signal up in a tight beam aimed at one point in the sky. To hear it, you have to be near that point.

The other half of the story is the neighborhood itself. Commercial geostationary satellites do not fly freely. Each one holds an assigned longitude inside a station-keeping box typically a tenth of a degree wide, roughly 70 kilometers at that altitude. A CSIS analysis of the public catalog found the median gap between neighboring geostationary satellites is 207 kilometers, and 96 percent sit more than 10 kilometers from their nearest neighbor. Operators coordinate slots through the International Telecommunication Union and maneuver plans through bodies like the Space Data Association. A satellite that drifts into someone else’s box without coordinating is, at minimum, a collision risk the owner has to manage on its own. Andrew D’Uva, an adviser to the Space Data Association, called Luch’s 2015 moves “reckless.”

That is the core of rendezvous and proximity operations in the geostationary belt. The same orbital mechanics that let a servicer dock with a client let an uninvited spacecraft sit just outside the client’s box for months.

The First Tour, 2015 to 2019

The first known stop lasted five months. In late September 2015, the satellite left the gap between Intelsat 7 and Intelsat 901 and moved west. By October it had settled at 24.4 degrees west, a tenth of a degree from Intelsat 905 at 24.5 degrees west. SpaceNews, citing sources, reported that the maneuvers had prompted several classified meetings inside the Defense Department and had caught the attention of lawmakers.

The target list mattered as much as the distance. Intelsat runs a large government services business, and some of its satellites carry U.S. military traffic. Many in the space community, SpaceNews reported, saw the episode as one of the first publicly documented cases of a commercial operator being approached this way by a foreign military satellite.

The disclosure came from a government. On September 7, 2018, French armed forces minister Florence Parly gave a speech on space defense at the Toulouse center of CNES, the French space agency, which developed the Athena-Fidus military communications satellite with Italy’s space agency. She told the audience that Luch-Olymp had come uncomfortably close to Athena-Fidus the year before, and she used the word “espionage” on the record.

Trying to listen to one’s neighbor is not only unfriendly. It’s called an act of espionage.

Trying to listen to one’s neighbor is not only unfriendly. It’s called an act of espionage.

France did not stop at the speech. The following year it published a military space strategy and stood up a dedicated space command. Luch was not the only reason, but it was the example Paris chose to put in front of the public.

The satellite kept moving. In late August 2019, T.S. Kelso of CelesTrak, who reviews a daily list of moving geostationary satellites, watched it stop right to Intelsat 17. C4ISRNet’s headline that September ended with one word, “again.” Kelso noticed the pattern shifting. “It looks like initially, the ‘visits’ were many months long but have gotten shorter over time,” he told the outlet. By 2020, according to a CSIS count reported by Spaceflight Now, the satellite had occupied at least 19 positions and approached 11 Intelsat satellites, four Eutelsat satellites, two SES satellites, and at least nine others belonging to operators from Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, the United Kingdom and the European Space Agency.

A Second Pair of Ears

On March 12, 2023, at 23:13 UTC, another Proton-M/Briz-M lifted off from Baikonur with a classified Russian government payload. KeepTrack’s catalog lists it as Luch-5X (Olymp-K 2), NORAD 55841 , international designator 2023-031A. Jonathan McDowell’s GCAT catalog carries it as Luch-5Kh No. 3. Both catalogs list ISS Reshetnev as the manufacturer of both spacecraft and the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, as owner. NASASpaceFlight reported it as Olymp-K-2, and Spaceflight Now noted that independent analysts considered the Luch 5X name a cover for a classified satellite run by the FSB or the Russian military, just as the first one had been.

It did not take long for the new satellite to show the family habit. Slingshot Aerospace, the California tracking company, told Breaking Defense in October 2023 that the satellite had begun moving east to west soon after launch and was making stops near non-Russian satellites, a “pattern of life” in Slingshot’s words. Slingshot did not name the targets, saying only that all of them were commercially owned, and its closest measured approach was 16 kilometers. A separate tracking startup, DigitalArsenal.io, posted a visualization showing the satellite within 18 kilometers of Eutelsat 3B. Audrey Schaffer of Slingshot, who until shortly before had been director of space policy at the National Security Council, said the behavior “could be considered unfriendly.”

Langbroek has kept a running log of where the second satellite parked and who it parked beside.

Commercial trackers filled in detail along the way. French startup Aldoria told operators in May 2024 that it had detected what it called “a sudden close approach” to a geostationary satellite on April 12, with a minimum distance of 10 kilometers. Aldoria did not name the target, though Langbroek’s log puts the Russian satellite beside Astra 4A at the time. Slingshot’s own figures for that period were larger. Its closest approach list, published by SpaceNews in June 2024, put Astra 4A at 45 kilometers and the overall minimum at 20 kilometers, from Eutelsat’s KA-SAT 9A. Distance estimates from ground telescopes vary, and none of these operators has published its raw data.

In June 2024, Slingshot flagged a large maneuver on June 23 and predicted the satellite would stop near Intelsat 1002 on June 28 if it followed its usual routine. Langbroek’s log shows it stopping first at 0.54 degrees west near Thor 7 on July 1, then shifting to 0.92 degrees west beside Intelsat 1002 in mid-September. On February 7, 2025, it began drifting east. Over the following month it covered more than 62 degrees of longitude, its largest move since launch, and settled near 62 degrees east on March 7, beside Intelsat 39 .

That 62 East neighborhood is not a quiet part of the belt. Intelsat 33e broke apart at 60 degrees east in October 2024, scattering hundreds of fragments through the region, a story we covered in our Intelsat 33e investigation . Russia parked a deliberately maneuvering satellite a couple of degrees from a fresh debris cloud.

Governments Stop Speaking in Hypotheticals

For most of the program’s life, the public case rested on orbital mechanics and inference. That changed in 2025 and 2026, when European officials began speaking it directly.

On September 25, 2025, German defense minister Boris Pistorius told the Federation of German Industries’ Space Congress in Berlin that two Russian Luch-Olymp satellites were shadowing two Intelsat satellites used by the Bundeswehr. In the same speech, he announced 35 billion euros of military space investment over the five years and warned that “Russia and China have expanded their capabilities for warfare in space rapidly over the past years: They can disrupt satellite operations, blind satellites, manipulate or kinetically destroy them,” as quoted by CNN.

Then, in early February 2026, the Financial Times reported that European security officials believed the two spacecraft had likely intercepted the communications of at least a dozen key satellites over Europe. Major General Michael Traut, head of the German military’s space command, told the paper both satellites were suspected of “doing sigint business,” and said he presumed they had intercepted the command links of the satellites they approached. Belinda Marchand, Slingshot’s chief science officer, told the FT that Luch/Olymp-K 2 was still in proximity to Intelsat 39.

Geostationary satellites over Europe approached by Luch/Olymp-K 2 since its 2023 launch

Slingshot Aerospace data, as reported by the Financial Times in February 2026. The full list has not been published.

The officials’ concern went beyond eavesdropping on customers. A senior European intelligence official told the FT that many satellites serving Europe were launched years ago without onboard encryption, so their command data travels in the clear. Analysts quoted in the report said an adversary holding recorded command data could in principle impersonate ground controllers and send false thruster commands. The same intelligence official also said neither Luch satellite was likely capable of jamming or destroying a satellite itself. None of the reporting described an instance of command spoofing happening. It is still the most specific link Western officials have drawn between the parking habit and a threat to satellite control.

The End of the First Satellite

Three months later, it came apart. On January 30, 2026, telescopes operated by the Swiss tracking company s2a systems recorded a fragmentation beginning at 06:09 UTC, with additional objects appearing around the tumbling spacecraft. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told Space.com that an impact from untracked debris was a plausible cause, since fuel and batteries should have been vented when the satellite was retired. Slingshot’s Marchand told the FT that telescopes had first seen what looked like a plume of gas. “It looks like it began with something to do with the propulsion,” she said. Nobody outside Russia knows whether the satellite was properly passivated, and we found no Russian statement on the event.

The location makes the breakup worse. Graveyard orbits are supposed to be the safe disposal option for geostationary satellites, a few hundred kilometers above traffic where dead hardware can sit indefinitely. A fragmentation there, after the Intelsat 33e breakup in the operational belt itself, is another data point that the high orbits are not as empty as their reputation. You can still find the main body in KeepTrack at NORAD 40258 .

The second satellite never left its post. The FT reporting placed it near Intelsat 39 in February 2026. In KeepTrack’s own catalog, it appears as station-kept in the neighbor list of our September 2026 ZhongXing-10 departure notice , at the same minimum range and the same timestamp as Intelsat 39. That is what you would expect if the two were still sitting close together near 62 East, eighteen months after the Russian satellite arrived.

Circumstantial, but Strong

The evidence for Luch/Olymp’s purpose is mostly circumstantial, but it is strong. The program’s satellites carry a relay-network name while behaving nothing like relay satellites. Relay satellites need fixed positions to serve their users. These spent years hopping between commercial and military communications satellites owned by NATO-country operators and parking inside their neighborhoods. “These are all Nato-based operators,” Norbert Pouzin, a senior orbital analyst at Aldoria, told the FT. French and German ministers and generals have described the satellites as espionage or signals intelligence platforms on the record, and unnamed European security officials told the FT the same.

There is no public evidence that either satellite ever interfered with, jammed, or physically touched a target. Every approach reported to date has been a stakeout rather than an attack. The approaches have been close by the standards of the belt, around 10 kilometers at the reported minimums and 5 kilometers in the U.S. military’s early figures, but those numbers come from operators, commercial trackers and one terse military statement, not from any published Russian data. The targets of several stops were never publicly named. What was collected, if anything, is classified on every side.

The case for treating the program as a threat rests on the cumulative pattern. A decade of uncoordinated close approaches in the most commercially valuable orbit there is, run by a state that would not answer the operator it was parked to, is a safety problem even before you get to intelligence. That it also appears to be an intelligence collection campaign against older European satellites with weak command security is why governments started naming it out loud.

Luch/Olymp-K 1 launches

Proton-M/Briz-M from Baikonur on September 27 UTC. Catalogued as NORAD 40258, international designator 2014-058A.

Parks between Intelsat 7 and Intelsat 901

Settles at 18.1 degrees west around April 4. Sources tell SpaceNews it came within 10 km at times. Intelsat gets no answer from the owners.

Moves to Intelsat 905

After leaving in late September, settles at 24.4 degrees west, a tenth of a degree from Intelsat 905 at 24.5 degrees west.

Approaches Athena-Fidus

Comes close to the French-Italian military communications satellite. France goes public a year later.

Stops beside Intelsat 17

CelesTrak's T.S. Kelso flags the satellite halting right to Intelsat 17.

Luch/Olymp-K 2 launches

Proton-M/Briz-M from Baikonur on March 12 UTC. NORAD 55841, international designator 2023-031A.

Second satellite starts its own tour

Slingshot Aerospace describes a 'pattern of life' of stops near commercial satellites. A DigitalArsenal.io visualization shows it 18 km from Eutelsat 3B.

62-degree hop to Intelsat 39

Leaves its post near Intelsat 1002 at 1 degree west on February 7 and settles near 62 degrees east on March 7.

Germany names the program

Defense minister Boris Pistorius says two Luch-Olymp satellites are shadowing Intelsat satellites used by the Bundeswehr.

Raised into a graveyard orbit above the protected GEO region over two weeks of burns.

Swiss tracking company s2a systems observes pieces separating from the retired satellite on January 30.

European officials go to the FT

Officials say the two satellites likely intercepted communications from at least a dozen key satellites over Europe.

The first Luch/Olymp is gone, scattered across a graveyard orbit. The second is three and a half years into its career, and if it matches its predecessor’s eleven years, it has most of a decade left. Nothing in Russia’s behavior suggests the program is ending. Russia evidently judged the first satellite useful enough to build a second, and Aldoria’s Pouzin told the FT that two newer Russian satellites launched in 2025, Cosmos 2589 and Cosmos 2590, appear to have similar maneuvering capabilities.

What has changed is the tracking. In 2015, Intelsat spent months trying to get someone to explain its new neighbor. In 2026, a satellite like Luch/Olymp-K 2 is followed by Slingshot, Aldoria, s2a systems, Kayhan, amateur observers like Langbroek, and catalogs like ours, and its stops are public within days. That kind of space domain awareness is the same work that caught China’s SJ-21 towing a dead satellite out of the belt in 2022. None of it stops the listening, since a satellite parked beside yours can still hear your uplink. It does remove most of the deniability the program enjoyed in its first decade.

Expect the second satellite to keep moving every few months and to keep favoring European and Intelsat targets. Expect European operators and governments to put more weight on encrypted command links for new satellites, because that is the countermeasure that most directly blunts the stakeout. You can watch Luch/Olymp-K 2 in the KeepTrack app at NORAD 55841 and see what it is parked to yourself.

Russian Satellite Maneuvers, Silence Worry Intelsat - SpaceNews, October 9, 2015

Russian Luch Satellite Relocates to Another Intelsat Craft - SpaceNews, October 2015

Espionage: French defense head charges Russia of dangerous games in space - Defense News, September 7, 2018

Paris accuse Moscou d'espionnage sur un satellite franco-italien - France 24, September 7, 2018

Russian satellite creeps up to Intelsat satellite, again - C4ISRNet, September 3, 2019

Unusual Behavior in GEO, Luch (Olymp-K) - CSIS Aerospace Security Project

Proton rocket launches classified Russian government satellite - Spaceflight Now, March 13, 2023

Russian Proton-M launches Olymp-K-2 military satellite - NASASpaceFlight, March 2023

Russian Luch (Olymp) 2 Satellite Approaching Multiple GEO Spacecraft - Slingshot Aerospace

Second Russian Luch/Olymp satellite now trailing Western systems in orbit - Breaking Defense, October 17, 2023

See a Russian inspector satellite get up close and personal with a spacecraft in orbit - Space.com, June 3, 2024

Russian spy satellite reportedly continues suspicious maneuvers - SpaceNews, June 27, 2024

The Russian eavesdropping satellite LUCH (OLYMP-K) 2 has moved significantly - SatTrackCam Leiden, March 2025

Russia is shadowing our satellites, German defense minister says - CNN, September 25, 2025

German military to invest $41B in space capabilities - Breaking Defense, September 25, 2025

Tracking the Tracker, Is Russia's LUCH (OLYMP) Approaching the End of Its Mission - Kayhan Space, October 2025

Russian Satellite That Worried NATO Enters End-of-Life Orbit - Newsweek, November 2025

Russian 'inspector' satellite appears to break apart in orbit, raising debris concerns - Space.com, January 30, 2026

Russia suspected of intercepting EU satellites - Semafor, February 4, 2026

Russian 'Inspector' spacecraft intercepted communications from a dozen European satellites, report claims - Tom's Hardware, February 6, 2026

Luch (Olymp-K 1), NORAD 40258 - KeepTrack satellite record

Luch-5X (Olymp-K 2), NORAD 55841 - KeepTrack satellite record

Geostationary orbit, debris and defunct launcher stages in the geostationary ring (hero image, cropped, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO) - ESA

Theodore 'TK' Kruczek is a radar analyst and former Air Force Major specializing in Space Operations. He is passionate open-source projects, coding, craft beer, and writing. TK is the creator of KeepTrack.Space and has developed tools like the Orbital Object Toolkit and SignalRange .

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