We can confirm the successful deployment of the satellites on Spaceflight's Astra-1 mission today. We are grateful to our partner @spaceflightinc and incredibly proud of this mission success. #AdAstra

I spent nearly a year beginning in March 2015 living onboard the International Space Station with the Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko — a partnership that would have been very unlikely when we were younger. As a U.S. Navy fighter pilot during the Cold War, serving in the region between northwest Russia and Scandinavia, I might have been trying to kill one of Misha’s fellow cosmonauts, and he me, had hostilities led to aerial combat: He was flying MiGs in the region around the same time. Instead, in 2010 and 2011, I commanded Expedition 26 aboard the space station, and that cosmonaut, Dmitri Kondratyev, was one of my crewmates.

But I am also deeply pained by the Russian space agency’s recent threats against the space station program to which I and so many others have devoted our lives. Last month, the head of the Russian space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, threatened to let the space station de-orbit and crash into the United States (Russia is responsible for the rocket reboosts that keep the station at its proper altitude, though NASA spacecraft could take over this responsibility if necessary).

More troublingly, last week Rogozin tweeted a strange video portraying Russian cosmonauts separating the Russian segment and flying away from the space station after waving goodbye to American astronaut Mark Vande Hei. A Russian Soyuz spacecraft is scheduled to bring Vande Hei back to Earth on March 30; the video seems to threaten to leave him behind, an unthinkable violation of the trust built between our two countries in space over decades. I was appalled, so I called him out strongly on Twitter in a rapidly escalating back-and-forth until he ultimately blocked me.

Forty-seven years ago, before most Americans were born, an Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit. A hatch opened between them, and Russian cosmonaut Alexey Leonov and NASA astronaut Tom Stafford came together to shake hands. Their handshake was a historic moment that brought our two countries one step closer to the end of the Cold War. Now those hostilities are being reignited. The people of Ukraine are paying the price for Putin’s aggression, and our peaceful cooperation in space may as well. I also fear for the Russian people and the effect that sanctions will have on their lives. I have many friends in Russia, some in the space program and others not, and they have different opinions on this war. There are those who believe that the war is the criminal act of one man; the others — well, they have been brainwashed by a state-controlled media led by a master propagandist.

The International Space Station is a great symbol of cooperation between formerly warring countries. But it is also a real place where people live, work and form unbreakable friendships.

In the summer of 2015, Gennady Padalka, Kornienko and I huddled together in our dark and cold Soyuz as a defunct satellite hurtled toward us at 35,000 mph. We knew we might die that day. If we had, it would have been with the shared belief that what we were doing had meaning. Everyone who has ever lived on the space station — 241 people from 19 countries — has risked their life to carry out peaceful exploration and research. There is a phenomenon called the Overview Effect: People who have seen the planet from space without political borders witness the fragility of the atmosphere and experience the oneness we seem to share on this orbiting utopia flying through space. We are left with the sense that we are in this thing called humanity, all of us, together. I believe it.