“Colossal competence”
Ex-Roscosmos boss becomes senator for occupied region
September 23, 2023, 7:36 p.m
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Dmitri Rogozin was once Russia’s deputy prime minister and later head of the space agency Roscosmos. After his dismissal from this position, he becomes a military advisor for pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. Now he is back in an official position in an occupied oblast.
The former head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, has been appointed senator from the Russian-controlled Zaporizhia region of Ukraine. The region’s governor, Yevgeny Balitsky, said he had authorized Rogozin to become a senator of the Russian Federation by decree. He referred to the “experience and colossal competence” of the former head of Roscosmos, who supports the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
At the beginning of September, Russia held local and regional elections in the four Ukrainian regions whose annexation it announced in September 2022, and then announced the victory of the Kremlin United Russia party. The government in Kiev and Western countries criticized the elections as “illegal”.
Rogozin thanked the governor of the Zaporizhia region and said he would “represent this liberated region, which is part of Old Russia, in the upper house of our federal parliament,” according to Russian news agency Tass. His priority is “continuing the liberation of the region.”
Rogozin was fired by Roscosmos in July 2022. He then led a group of military advisers supporting pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. Last December he was injured in a Ukrainian airstrike in the pro-Russian bastion of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine. According to his own statements and in a highly public manner, he later sent a piece of shrapnel that was said to have injured him to French President Emmanuel Macron. Rogozin, who was once Russia’s deputy prime minister, is a critic of the West and known for his diatribes against enemies of Russia.