Soyuz spacecraft lands with two Russians, American aboard

A Soyuz spacecraft carrying an American and two Russians from the International Space Station (ISS) landed back on Earth Sunday on the steppe of Kazakhstan, Russia's Roscosmos space agency said.

"Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan," the space agency said.

The Russian cosmonauts Ovchinin and Vagner and NASA astronaut Pettit had spent 220 days in space after travelling to the ISS in September last year.

They coincided on the ISS until March with a pair of US astronauts who came for eight days and ended up stranded for more than nine months after the spacecraft they travelled on was deemed unfit to fly them back to Earth.

Space is one of the final areas of US-Russia cooperation amid an almost complete breakdown in relations between Moscow and Washington over the Ukraine conflict.

© Agence France-Presse