ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses how the Russia–Ukraine conflict has affected space and NATO's policy, highlighting the growing significance of space as a contested and strategic domain in modern warfare. Moscow's cyber operations and debris-creating anti-satellite (ASAT) tests, along with Kyiv's reliance on commercial operators, such as Starlink's constellations and privately supplied imagery, show how space capabilities can shape conflicts. The conflict also fractured over three decades of Russo-Western cooperation, the emblem of which was Russia's withdrawal from the International Space Station, marking a shift toward national and bilateral programs. Against this backdrop, the chapter also traces NATO's rapidly evolving posture in the space domain. Since recognizing space as an operational domain in 2019, the Alliance has created a Space Centre, a Space Centre of Excellence, extended Article 5 to cover attacks to, from, or within space, and adopted a Commercial Space Strategy that makes industry services a formal pillar of deterrence and resilience. While this public–private model offers redundancy, it also raises difficult questions of sovereignty, accountability, and targetability for dual-use assets. The chapter places these developments within the current governance gap, due to outdated and non-binding normative frameworks, to highlight that meaningful security and stability will require updated norms, enforceable behavioral rules, and deeper, genuinely multilateral cooperation – objectives made more urgent, yet more complex, by the lessons from the Russia–Ukraine conflict.
