Iran Press/ Europe: Cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveev, and Sergey Korsakov lifted off aboard a Soyuz MS-21 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad in Kazakhstan at 11:55 a.m. ET.
The crew's launch and trip to the space station, which should take just over three hours, will be streamed live on NASA's website.
It's the first spaceflight for Matveev and Korsakov, and the trio will spend the next six and a half months aboard the space station. The cosmonauts manually guided the Soyuz through docking with the space station and successfully docked at 3:12 p.m.
Typically, Russian Soyuz launches include two cosmonauts and at least one NASA astronaut or another international partner due to a crew swap agreement between Russian space agency Roscosmos and other agencies.
It's not the first time an all-Russian mission has occurred -- a Russian crew flew to the station in October to film the first movie in space.
Although this cosmonaut launch occurs at a time when geopolitical tensions are mounting, the absence of other nations' involvement is coincidental and based on a prior agreement between NASA and Roscosmos to a delayed crew swap for the future missions in 2022.
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