OREANDA-NEWS  Russia will completely abandon information from Western weather satellites by the end of 2024, head of Roshydromet Igor Shumakov told reporters.

"Until a certain time, we had close cooperation with our Western colleagues - with the EUMETSAT system, which supplied us with a fairly large amount of operational information that is required in our usual predictive activities," he said after the launch of the Soyuz-2.1b rocket with the Meteor-M satellite No. 2-4.

Recently, according to Shumakov, the information flow from Western satellites has almost dried up, but "thanks to colleagues from Roscosmos, the lack of information has been practically eliminated. "Looking ahead a little, I think that by the middle or by the end of this year, taking into account plans to launch hydrometeorological devices, we will be able to abandon EUMETSAT altogether," he added.