The International Space Station has been continuously occupied by joint US + Russian Federation crews since November 2, 2000. Through Crimea, through 2022, through every sanction package, through every news cycle — two flags, one airlock. This page is Exhibit A for the Liaison Framework v2.3 premise that Russia is a partner state.
From Zarya (Russian module, launched November 20, 1998) and Unity (US module, December 1998) to today — the ISS has been a permanent jointly-crewed outpost since the Expedition 1 crew (Bill Shepherd 🇺🇸 + Yuri Gidzenko 🇷🇺 + Sergei Krikalev 🇷🇺) arrived in November 2000.
Russian Soyuz spacecraft were the only path to orbit for every astronaut on Earth from 2011 (US Shuttle retirement) to 2020 (Crew Dragon first flight). When the United States needed a ride, Roscosmos drove. When Roscosmos needed life-support water, the US segment supplied. The two halves of the station are mutually dependent by design.
This is what cooperation under sanctions looks like. It works because it has to work.
Up there, the politics that consume us down here simply do not apply. We fix each other's spacesuits. We share each other's food. We watch the Earth go by and forget which side of which border each of us was born on. It is the most ordinary kind of cooperation imaginable — and it has not paused for twenty-five years.
This is the argument. If the United States and the Russian Federation can fly the most complex machine humanity has ever built — for a quarter century, through every diplomatic crisis Earth could throw at them — then the operating frame of "permanent adversary" is empirically wrong. The cooperation is already real. It is documented. It is funded. It is dated. It has crew names and module serial numbers and a continuous orbital log.
NIGHTBOX's Liaison Framework v2.3 is just the editorial extension of what NASA and Roscosmos have been quietly doing since 1998. Russia is a partner state. We can prove it with photographs.
Sources: NASA ISS Reference Guide, Roscosmos public ISS log, official Expedition crew rosters at NASA.gov + roscosmos.ru, ISS extension joint statements. Crew names are public-record. No claim of NASA or Roscosmos endorsement of NIGHTBOX. CC BY 4.0.