Russian officials say that the country's space mission to explore the South Pole of the Moon, which was carried out for the first time in almost half a century, has failed and the Luna-25 spacecraft has crashed on the surface of the Moon.

Afghan Voice Agency (AVA): The Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos, announced on Sunday, August 20, that the "Luna-25" probe hit the surface of the moon due to a technical defect.
 
Russia had previously announced that it had lost contact with Luna-25 following a problem with the probe's navigation. "The probe [while decelerating] moved into an unpredicted orbit and was destroyed by impact with the lunar surface," the Russian space agency said in a new statement.
 
The new probe was launched last Friday by a Soyuz rocket from the "Vostochny" space base located 7,000 kilometers east of Moscow.
 
Luna-25, which weighed about 800 kilograms, was supposed to land on the moon's South Pole, an area believed to contain large deposits of ice. Scientists from NASA and other space agencies have detected traces of frozen water in its shadowy craters in recent years.
 
Russia's new space mission has serious competitors such as India, which launched a probe named "Chandrayaan-3" to the moon last month. Meanwhile, the United States of America and China have already launched advanced programs to explore the South Pole of the Moon.
 
Russia's moon mission was important to Moscow because the Kremlin has repeatedly claimed that Western sanctions over the Ukraine war, many of which have targeted Russia's aerospace sector, have failed to cripple Russia's space prowess.
 
After Russia invaded Ukraine last year at the behest of Vladimir Putin, the European Space Agency announced that it would not cooperate with Moscow on the launch of Luna-25, as well as the upcoming Luna-26 and Luna-27 missions.
 
Despite this, Moscow has announced that it will continue its exploration programs on the moon and will replace the European Space Agency's equipment with Russian-made ones.