After more than a month of speculation, NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei did in fact return to Earth inside a Russian Soyuz spacecraft Wednesday, on the dusty steppes of Kazakhstan.

The landing of the small descent module was nominal, with clear skies in Kazakhstan a couple of hours before local sunset. Soyuz Commander Anton Shkaplerov emerged first from the vehicle, followed by Flight Engineer Pyotr Dubrov, and then finally Vande Hei, who soon donned a pair of sunglasses and flashed a thumbs-up at the camera.

Dubrov and Vande Hei both flew a 355-day mission, having launched to the International Space Station on April 9, 2021. For Vande Hei, this set a US duration record for a single spaceflight. A Russian cosmonaut, Valeri Polyakov, holds the global record for such a mission, having spent 437 days on the Mir space station in the mid-1990s.

There were no signs of the geopolitical tensions during the landing or broadcast feed provided by Roscosmos. At one point, the large video board in Mission Control Moscow flashed up a "Welcome back, Mark!" greeting in English. All of the televised images and broadcast commentary showed no hint of the conflict, and there was absolutely zero Russian war propaganda to be seen in the Soyuz landing zone.