Russia moves ISS astronaut training to newly annexed Crimea

On Monday, the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) announced plans to move survival training for all Soyuz passengers to a Russian naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea, after claiming to have "annexed" the peninsula from Ukraine earlier this year. The strategic move could put the US and other nations in a diplomatic bind as American, European, and Japanese astronauts-in-training would need to travel to the newly annexed territory without Ukrainian-issued visas.

If the foreign crew refuses to travel to Crimea, the astronauts would fail their training and would be disqualified from their trip to the International Space Station (ISS), which is due for a routine crew replacement.

As NBC News notes, the Sevastopol base was commonly used a decade ago for Russian splashdown survival training, when the country’s space program was headed by the Russian Air Force. "But as space budgets dwindled,” NBC says, "that training was transferred to a small lake near Moscow that was deemed adequate for the basics.” Today, the space program is managed by Roscosmos, and the budget is even tighter, so money issues are likely not responsible for the move back to Crimea.