Welcome to Cold War 2, folks. Following increased diplomatic tensions over Russia’s annexation of the Ukraine’s Crimea, Russia is threatening to ban the US from using the International Space Station. Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly in the short term, Russia will ban the US from buying the Russian RD-180 rocket engines that are currently used by the ULA’s Atlas V launcher to put the US military’s satellites into space. These sanctions, issued by Russia’s deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin, come in response to the US’s own sanctions that restrict exports to Russia. If you thought that the International Space Station — the most significant testimony of US-Russia cooperation following the Cold War — would be exempt from this geopolitical tit-for-tat, you were sadly mistaken.

Russia’s threats are perfectly timed. Since the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011, the only way that astronauts and cosmonauts can travel to and from the ISS is via the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Just this morning, the three crew members of ISS Expedition 39 returned to Earth via a Soyuz capsule after spending 188 days in space. A couple of weeks ago, following the US first sanctioned Russia over the Crimea crisis, Rogozin said that “I suggest the US delivers its astronauts to the ISS with a trampoline.” At the time we thought it was just a joke — but now, Rogozin says that Moscow will reject America’s request to access the ISS after 2020, and will ban the US from using the Russian rocket engines that currently lift the Atlas V launch system into space. Russia will also shut down the 11 GPS ground stations within its borders, but this is more likely a direct response to the US not allowing Russia to build GLONASS ground stations within its borders.

It isn’t entirely clear how Russia will prevent the US from accessing the ISS after 2020. It can stop carrying US astronauts in its Soyuz spacecraft, that’s for sure. But by 2020, it’s highly likely that the US will have an alternative method of reaching the ISS, via SpaceX’s manned Dragon craft. NASA’s Orion (kind of the Space Shuttle replacement) probably won’t be ready for manned flight until at least 2021. It might be that Rogozin isn’t even referring to the transport of US astronauts aboard Soyuz, though. “The Russian segment can exist independently from the American one. The US one cannot,” Rogozin said yesterday. Sadly he didn’t expand any further, but I believe he’s referring to the fact that the ISS is made up of many different modules — and without the Russian module Zvezda, which provides a number of critical systems, the US portion of the ISS would be dead weight. Russia might choose to disconnect its portion of the ISS, preventing the US from using its half. Dastardly.

Whether Russia will actually follow through with these sanctions it’s hard to say. The Russian space agency, Roscosmos, currently makes a lot of money selling RD-180 ($10 million) and Soyuz seats ($60 million each!) to the US. Meanwhile, US Congress is talking about developing its own first-stage engine for the Atlas V, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk wants to swoop in and grab the entire market with its cheap Falcon 9 launch system. Russia probably thinks that these sanctions would put the hurt on the US’s space interests, but in reality it is incredibly stupid (or brave) to challenge our fair nation’s ego. The Soviet Union and the US were much more evenly matched during the first Cold War — today, there is a huge technological disparity in favor of the Americans.

If Russia moves ahead with these sanctions, the best-case scenario is that it screws itself out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Worst-case, the US could be lured into starting a whole new space race, to achieve independence from Russia’s rocket engines and spacecraft, and to prove to the pinkos that there’s only one goddamn superpower on the planet that can bully other nations and get away with it. Don’t get me wrong: Cold War 2 would be awful for the world, but it would instantly and utterly solve NASA’s funding issues.