The statement that the latest Russian combat lasers are able to “reach out” to the satellites, has already excited Western military experts, who have begun to discuss the issue of security on their part. An additional urgency to discussing this issue was given by the US statement on the actual ultimatum to Russia on the “need to abandon violations of the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles” during 60 days. Otherwise, as stated in Washington, the United States will withdraw from the INF.
Speaking about Peresvet, in the West they remembered that Russia still has Soviet developments in the form of a “flying laser machine”. This is a complex A-60 based on IL-76MD. The complex made its first flight back in the year already 1981. At the same time, a megawatt laser installation was on board, which was ultimately planned to be launched into space.
Those developments were transformed into the appearance of the 1LK222 laser complex, which was originally conceived as an element of countering the US space defense component. In 2009, as a result of the experiment, a laser beam with A-60 was directed to a satellite with an orbit of 1,5 thousand km. As a result, a reflected signal was received. After this, work on improving the system was continued.
Often these works are described as a Sokol-Echelon project (still Soviet). It is noteworthy that in the English version of Wikipedia a separate article is devoted to this project. Sokol eshelon.

Summing up the demonstration of the Peresvet deployment and the work on the development of airborne laser installations, the United States notes that “the Russians could well have created an operating anti-satellite weapon". For understandable reasons, such statements cause panic in the US Congress, where they had previously stated that "the Russians could arrange star wars, disabling the American satellites." The extent to which the satellite component is important for the USA (and not only for the United States) is well known, and therefore disabling satellites can be a real catastrophe for a state that claims hegemony.