The profile of…
The head of the Russian space agency has not stopped pouring gasoline on the fire on Twitter since the West announced the first sanctions against his country for the invasion of Crimea in 2014
Tanks don’t need visas,” he said on Russian television in 2015 about sanctions over Crimea’s annexation that barred him from entering the European Union and the United States. Dmitri Rogozin was then deputy prime minister in charge of defense and space industries. He was joking, he pointed out. He did not threaten a West that he saw doomed to destruction “by the onslaught of the Islamic State and homosexuals.” In January 2008, when Vladimir Putin appointed him ambassador to NATO, the Nóvosti agency presented him as “an experienced and flexible diplomat”, according to “his colleagues”. However, he has been fighting fights on Twitter for years at the slightest opportunity. He is a textbook Trump player. He has made it clear with the invasion of Ukraine in case anyone had any doubts.
The son of a senior official in the Soviet Defense Ministry, Dmitri Olegovich Rogozin was born in Moscow on December 21, 1963. He graduated in Journalism from the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1986 and two years later in Economics from the University of Marxism. -Leninism, dependent on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, he fought in the Transnistrian war with pro-Russian separatists against Moldovan forces and, in 1993, joined the Congress of Russian Communities, led by General Alexander Lebed and born to defend ethnic Russians in the countries that emerged after the decomposition of the USSR.
After Lebed’s death in a helicopter accident in 2002, he and Sergei Glázyev – who in 2004 was a candidate for the Russian Presidency as an independent – headed a nationalist coalition named Ródina (fatherland). Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, a critic of Putin and shot to death in 2006, wrote in ‘Novaya Gazeta’ that it was a formation “created by the Kremlin’s ‘spin doctors'” in order, in the 2003 legislative elections, “to distance voters from moderate nationalists of the more extreme National Bolshevik Party. The elections were won by Putin’s United Russia, which won 223 seats out of 450. Ródina won 37 and became the president’s supporter in the Duma.
When the nationalist formation refused to present its own candidate for the 2004 presidential elections, a war broke out between Rogozin and Glázyev, who won the former. A year later, Rodina was banned from participating in the Moscow Duma elections for a television advertisement that incited racial hatred. In it, some immigrants ate watermelon in the street and left it a mess, ignoring a civic Rogozin who asked them to collect the remains. “Let’s clean our city of garbage,” read the screen at the end of the ad.
He resigned as leader of Rodina in early 2006. He tried to revive the Congress of Russian Communities, created the Great Russia party to compete in the 2007 legislative elections, and announced that he would support Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko as a candidate for the Kremlin. Authorities denied the party’s registration, Lukashenko was unable to appear as a non-Russian citizen, and Putin appointed Rogozin as ambassador to NATO in 2008.
to space on trampoline
Three years later, President Dmitri Medvedev appointed him deputy prime minister responsible for the defense and space industries, and as such called Madonna on Twitter in 2012 an “old bitch” for calling for the release of the Pussy Riot activists. He was one of the first high officials to be banned from entering the US and the EU due to the invasion of Crimea, and from that moment on, his outbursts on that social network multiplied. “After reviewing sanctions against our space industry, I suggest the US take its astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) using a trampoline,” he tweeted on April 29, 2014. Since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011 and until 2020, Washington relied on Moscow for astronaut travel.
In May 2014, Romania banned the plane he was traveling in from entering its airspace, and Rogozin warned on Twitter that next time he would fly in a Tu-160 bomber. Nostalgic like his boss for the imperial past, in a foreword he wrote that year for a book, he advocated recovering Alaska and the Aleutians. Bucharest again prohibited him from entering its airspace in July 2017 and a month later Moldova declared him ‘persona non grata’.
Director of Roscosmos – the Russian space agency – since May 2018, after the first sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, threatened on February 24 on Twitter to drop the International Space Station: «If they block cooperation with us, will Who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled orbit and falling into the United States… or Europe? Although the engines of the complex are in the Russian sector, disconnection is unlikely because, among other things, the American segment supplies power to the entire platform, including the Russian part.
In recent weeks, he has boasted of having erased the flags of the US, UK and Japan from Soyuz rockets, and has had fights with, among others, the American astronaut Scott Kelly, whom he has called an “imbecile”. His next ‘trumpet’ is a matter of time.
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