Russian cosmonauts boarding the International Space Station on Friday were wearing yellow and blue the colors of the Ukrainian flag that many have been using to show support for the nation as it faces a Russian invasion.
Some assumed the cosmonauts – Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov – were showing solidarity with Ukraine, but it’s unclear if that’s the case.
The cosmonauts launched from a facility in Kazakhstan Friday evening and arrived at the ISS three hours later, the Associated Press reported. They were the first new arrivals to the ISS since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
Multiple former NASA astronauts, including Scott Kelly and Terry Virts, tweeted about the yellow suits with blue accents, assuming they were intended as a show of support for Ukraine.
But the cosmonauts themselves did not say anything that implied the suits were a political statement.
After boarding the space station and making a video call back down to earth, Artemyev was asked about the suits during a broadcast aired by Roscosmos, Russia’s government space program.
“It became our turn to pick a color. But, in fact, we had accumulated a lot of yellow material so we needed to use it,” he said, according to AP. “So that’s why we had to wear yellow.”
Eric Berger, a space reporter at Ars Technica, said the spacesuits are typically picked out and packed months before a mission, but that it was possible the cosmonauts smuggled them on.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics, noted that yellow and blue are also the colors used by Bauman University in Moscow, which all three cosmonauts attended.
The cosmonauts will spend six and half months on the space station, where they joined two other Russian cosmonauts, four NASA astronauts, and one German astronaut with the European Space Agency.
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