GLONASS leverage
After the annexation of Crimea, Russia threatened to switch off GLONASS reference stations on US soil and suspended cooperation on shared positioning infrastructure, weaponising what had been a civilian standard.
A working catalogue entry, kept current. Each paragraph is drawn from the publicly documented record.
After the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin publicly threatens to switch off the GLONASS reference stations sited on US soil under a long-running cooperative agreement, and to suspend collaborative work on cross-system positioning improvements.
The episode weaponises what had been a textbook example of post-Cold-War civilian-standards cooperation and reminds Western navigation customers that there is no signal that someone, somewhere, cannot pull. By 2024 GLONASS itself is operating in degraded form due to sanctions on Russian electronics imports — proof that the same logic cuts both ways.
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