Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment hits differently after the Ukraine invasion. I hadn't thought about the sheer level of diplomatic nightmare that has been avoided because Russia can't use cutting off access to the ISS as a bargaining chip.
They still can use cutting off the ISS as a bargaining chip since half the station is Russian and handles orbit raising. They actually did do that a lot early into the war, until Rogozin was replaced as head of Roscosmos by someone who took a slightly less bombastic approach of saying that Russia would quit the ISS once they have a successor station up later this decade. What gets in the way is that the US has severa…
The orbit raising has been performed by the Progress resupply vehicles from Russia and Shuttle and other vehicles from the US. As of 2018 the Cygnus resupply vehicle from the US was capable of performing the orbit raising mission.
While the Cygnus was still docked at the space station's Unity module on Tuesday (July 10), the spacecraft fired its main engine for 50 seconds as part of a test to determine whether the cargo ship can be used to raise the space station's orbit, Frank DeMauro, Vice President of Advanced Programs at NGIS, told Space.com.
About the size of a short bus, the Cygnus may look puny compared to the ISS, which is as big as a football field. But its powerful Delta-V engine provided enough thrust to raise the space station by about 282 feet (86 meters). "The burn went extremely well," DeMauro said. "The spacecraft behaved exactly as we expected."
https://www.space.com/41172-cygnus-leaves-space-station-orbi...