Russian security officials say they are tracking down an eBay seller known as "Maksuta" who is offering a rare Krechet-94 Soviet cosmonaut suit, designed for the USSR's cancelled Moon landing programme, for £258,000 with free shipping to American collectors. A Russian security source described the sale as "scandalous" and said the FSB is monitoring such trades, with the regime reportedly determined to see the suit returned to Russia rather than sold to Western buyers.

The suit is one of twenty-two Krechet units built at the Zvezda factory near Moscow in 1967 for use on the lunar surface, a programme abandoned in 1974 after rocket failures and the success of US Moon landings. Under Russian law dating to 1993, exporting cultural artefacts of this kind can carry fines of up to one million rubles or up to five years in prison or hard labour, and much of the surviving hardware left Russia informally after the 1991 Soviet collapse, when officials and scientists sold off state stockpiles. The seller's true identity remains unconfirmed, though he claims to be the son of a Soviet space scientist.