Russian, German and US astronauts dock with ISS

A crew of Russian, German and US astronauts docked with the International Space Station Thursday as space cooperation between Moscow and the West continues despite their worst standoff since the Cold War.

"At 5:44 am Moscow time (01:44 GMT), the manned Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft docked successfully with the ISS," the Russian space agency Roskosmos said in a statement.

Russian cosmonaut Maxim Surayev, his NASA colleague Reid Wiseman and German Alexander Gerst from the European Space Agency opened the hatch into the ISS just over two hours later, Russian mission control said on its website.

Grinning broadly, they hugged the crew of three already on board the international space laboratory, US astronaut Steve Swanson and Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev.

The Soyuz craft had blasted off from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on schedule shortly before midnight Moscow time.

The astronauts took a six-hour fast-track route to the ISS after the previous crew to travel to the ISS in March was forced to spend two days in orbit due to a technical glitch.

The new ISS crewmembers are due to carry out a mission lasting 167 days and return to Earth in November.

Surayev, 42, is on his second lengthy ISS mission after his maiden voyage in 2009, when he became the first Russian space blogger. Wiseman and Gerst, who are both 38, are on their first space mission.