Russian spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei lands in Kazakhstan

According to NASA's Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas, Vande Hei, fellow cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov, and Pyotr Dubrov landed on Earth at 7:28 a.m. ET following module separation at 7 a.m., just 30 minutes after the deorbit burn for the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft began.

NASA doctors and crew were already present at the touchdown site with plans to rush Dubrov and Vande Hei-- both launched to the ISS on Soyuz MS-18 on April 9, 2021-- to Texas for immediate medical attention as a pre-emptive measure.

NASA confirms that Vande Hei, a US national, spent 355 days in a row on the ISS, the longest unbroken streak by an American on the orbiting station. While Dubrov (a Russian cosmonaut) too spent 355 days there, he won't be making any records for his stay as the longest continuous time spent by a cosmonaut of Russia at ISS is 438 days by Valeri Polyakov, who spent more than 14 months aboard the Mir space station, returning to Earth in 1995


The landing comes amid rising Russian-American tensions over Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine after Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed interest in becoming the 31st country to join the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), a move which Putin has since described as a "serious security risk to Russia."

"This is a very challenging time for international relations. My hope is that, in our attempts to further and find peace throughout the world, these types of connections that we have can be maintained and serve as a path forward to try to find that common ground that we need so desperately to find peace," Vande Hei said in an interview with NASA last week.

"People have problems on Earth. On orbit ... we are one crew," Shkaplerov said in a live NASA TV broadcast Tuesday.