The Space Forces are preparing for a launch of two satellites on December 20th. The satellites, identified in the news as Gonets and Rodnik just arrived to Plesetsk. The launcher that will be used in the upcoming launch is Kosmos-3M (so much for the recent promise to stop these launches).
The upcoming launch largely fits into the pattern of Gonets/Strela-3 launches established since 2002 - satellites are launched in pairs by Kosmos-3M (before 2002 they were launched six at a time by Tsyklon-3). The last launch of this kind was in September 2004.
The difference this time is that the military satellite launched along with Gonets is some Rodnik, not Strela-3. Right now it is hard to tell whether this is a modification of Strela-3 or a new satellite or just a different name of the old one.
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Hi, interesting re RODNIK - we have detected the downlinks for these 2 new satellites (gonets/rodnik) - 262.9125 is gonets with 1/minute bursts, and 265.945 with PSK bursts, again 1 per minute.
PJM message above is incorrect - neither Rodnik nor Gonets D1-M is transmitting near 260 MHz. They transmit in a different frequency band.