An information request for a page on my website: What is the situation with Russian satellite communication with the ISS? I read that there is a satellite called Molniya that has to be shared with the military, so it is only available sometimes.
This James Oberg article at The Space Review -
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/619/1 - says that TsUP can get voice coverage via NASA's relay satellites, but not telemetry from the Russian segment.
(A bit confused)
My impression was that Molniya is used to relay between the Russian ground sites to the control center, not to talk to ISS directly (this was mentioned in connection with the telemetry dropout on the Exp 13 launch). The ground sites are scattered of thousands of miles of remote territory. The Soviets did have a TDRS like system in Mir days, but AFAIK that has been out of commission for years.
Hopefully someone will correct me if this is wrong, the above is going from guess and memory.
A few ground stations in Russia (and Ukraine, I think), the US TDRSS via Houston for the 'black-out regions', used to have ocean ship based relay stations and relay sats but those were either scrapped or stopped working. The plans were/are for the 'Luch' ('beam') sats by Reshetnyov NPO to re-create the station retranslation network which was planned since the Mir days, and even some designs to use the Yamal GSO telcom sats as relays by affixing some transponders to the station?! Not sure how far that is in implementation, 'cause sooner or later this little problem is going to bite big time... especially for the Progress/Souyz approache command uploads. And then there is that upcoming (hopefully) launch and docking of the FGB-2 in 2008 which will require some serious ground control lest it smacks into the station.