Russian cosmonauts have arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) wearing the colours of the Ukrainian flag in what appeared to be a message of solidarity with the invaded country.

The three-person team docked their Soyuz capsule with the outpost for a mission that continues a shared Russian-US presence in orbit despite tensions over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

About 2-1/2 hours after arriving, the astronauts, dressed in yellow flight suits, floated head-first into the ISS.

The team was led by commander Oleg Artemyev, accompanied by spaceflight rookies Denis Matveev and Sergey Korsakov.

Their uniform is usually plain blue, and one of the men was seen wearing it before taking off.

"It became our turn to pick a colour," commander Artemyev told a NASA live stream.

"We had accumulated a lot of yellow material so we needed to use it," he quipped.

"That's why we had to wear yellow."

People have been wearing the colours of the Ukrainian national flag to show solidarity with the besieged nation.

The suspected protest comes after a Russian woman was fined £214 (30,000 roubles) after she interrupted a live news bulletin on state TV and denounced the invasion of Ukraine.

Marina Ovsyannikova, 44, an editor at Russian station Channel One, interrupted a broadcast on Monday evening.

NASA officials have said that US and Russian ISS crew members, while aware of events on Earth, were still working together professionally and that geopolitical tensions had not infected the space station.

The arrival of the latest cosmonaut team - warmly welcomed by four Americans, two Russians and a German crewmate already aboard - came a day after the European Space Agency (ESA) announced it had suspended a joint robotic rover mission to Mars with Russia due to the Ukraine conflict.

The rendezvous with the space station capped a flight of three hours and 10 minutes following liftoff of the Soyuz spacecraft from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Meanwhile, Ukraine's president Zelenskyy called for comprehensive peace talks with Moscow to stop its invasion, saying it would otherwise take Russia "several generations" to recover from its losses in the war.

Russian forces have taken heavy losses and their advance has largely stalled since Russian president Vladimir Putin launched the assault on 24 February, with long columns of troops that bore down on Kyiv halted in its suburbs.

"I want everyone to hear me now, especially in Moscow. The time has come for a meeting, it is time to talk," Zelenskyy said in a video address early on Saturday.

"The time has come to restore territorial integrity and justice for Ukraine. Otherwise, Russia's losses will be such that it will take you several generations to recover." (Yahoo News)

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