In the event, one of the orbital burns scheduled to refine the trajectory did not occur as planned, due to an attitude control problem in which the spacecraft was incorrectly oriented.

[5][6] The Soyuz remained docked to the ISS to serve as an emergency escape vehicle until undocking and landing as scheduled on 11 September 2014.

The spacecraft was not able to perform the third course-correction successfully, however, and docking was rescheduled for Thursday, 27 March at 23:58 UTC at the earliest.

The approach and docking phase of the mission was reverted to the previous two-day profile used in Soyuz flights before Soyuz TMA-08M, leaving the possibility of updating the mission profile after the nature of the issue was fully known.

The crew members of TMA-12M remained aboard the ISS until September 2014, when the spacecraft undocked and returned to Earth as scheduled.