Zenit was originally built in the 1980s for two purposes: as a liquid rocket booster for the Energia rocket and, equipped with a second stage, as a stand-alone middle-weight launcher with a payload greater than the 7 tonnes of the Soyuz but smaller than the 20 tonnes payload of the Proton.

The Ukrainian space industry was highly integrated with that of Russia due to its Soviet heritage, but that cooperation was interrupted by the Russo-Ukrainian War beginning in 2014, which has effectively led to a hiatus in the Zenit program.

The failure was traced to a leak in a LOX line that caused a fire in the thrust section of the booster.

Estimated repair costs were about 45 million rubles, but the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that there were no funds available, so the pad was abandoned.

Following two failures in 1991–92 both caused by the second stage, the Zenit was on the verge of being cancelled entirely, but a successful flight in November 1992 saved the program.

The rate of Zenit launches slowed to a trickle during the 1990s due to the severely cash-strapped Russian Federation, and also because of Russia's reluctance to fly military payloads on a booster manufactured in now-independent Ukraine.

The basic Zenit booster received several upgrades to the propulsion and avionics systems for Sea Launch as well as a third stage, and the first test with a dummy payload was carried out on March 27, 1999.

There followed eight consecutive successful launches until Apstar 5 in 2004 suffered a premature third stage shutdown that left it in an incorrect orbit, but the satellite's onboard engines corrected it.

After nine successful launches, the Zenit produced a repeat performance of the 1990 disaster when on January 30, 2007, the first stage lost thrust and exploded.

Subsequent investigation showed that the Zenit had begun deviating from its flight path when the pitch and roll maneuver started.

The onboard computer sensed an abnormal situation and sent an automatic shutdown command to the first stage at T+23 seconds, and impact with the ocean occurred about one minute after liftoff.

Ultimately, the failure was traced to a defective hydraulic pump that controlled gimbaling of the first stage engines.

This resulted in the booster starting an uncontrolled rolling motion which caused the computer system to terminate all thrust.

[9] Despite the ongoing conflict between the two governments, a Zenit rocket was launched in December 2017, after a two-year hiatus, to deliver AngoSat 1.

[12] Four Zenit first stages were attached to the core vehicle to produce extra thrust at lift-off, in the same way that Solid Rocket Boosters were used on the US Space Shuttle.

[16] The most recent launch occurred on 26 December 2017 from Baikonur Cosmodrome when the rocket lifted off with the Angolian Angosat 1 spacecraft.