IRIS² vs. Starlink: Europe’s Bid to Break Ukraine Free from Musk

When Billionaire Bandwidth Becomes a Liability

Licensed by the author from Envato Elements

Ukraine’s digital Achilles’ heel is not a lack of satellites, routers, or even bandwidth… It’s a billionaire.

The last time I spoke out about Elon Musk (well before he went “full evil” as a Trump enabler), my audience nearly crucified me.

How dare I speak out against the great man who is fighting climate change with his EV cars and who is plotting a course for humanity’s future among the stars!?

Well, I dared. The guy just gave off strong cult leader vibes.

Months later, when the 2024 campaign was in full swing, Musk revealed his true motivations.

Elon Musk’s Starlink constellation, with its thousands of Low Earth Orbit satellites and whiplash-inducing Terms of Service changes, has been the bedrock of Ukrainian military communications since the early days of the invasion.

And for good reason: it worked when nothing else did.

But over time, the relationship has become strained; more like an unpredictable landlord than a strategic ally. From Musk’s erratic statements about restricting access to frontline comms to his recent Twitter-era, Kremlin-adjacent sympathies, it’s clear Ukraine needs a contingency plan.

Or, to put it more bluntly, they need to stop outsourcing military-grade communications to a guy who occasionally treats nuclear powers like NPCs in a sandbox game.

This is where IRIS² comes in, the EU’s ambitious satellite project designed to create a secure, sovereign alternative to Starlink; one that doesn’t rely on the whims of an American billionaire or a defense contract held together by tweets and Tesla stock prices.

The European Constellation with a Conscience

IRIS², short for Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity, and Security by Satellite, is a fundamentally different beast from Starlink. Where Starlink is a private-sector juggernaut moving fast and occasionally breaking things (like battlefield connectivity policies), IRIS² is the opposite: multilateral and designed from the start with public accountability in mind. It is not a tech bro’s side hustle. It’s the product of painstaking negotiation among EU member states, aerospace heavyweights, and regulatory bodies that still use fountain pens.

Creator: George Lekatis - EUSL

Unlike Starlink, which sprang from Silicon Valley’s “ask forgiveness, not permission” ethos, IRIS² is rooted in European values like data sovereignty, democratic oversight, and yes, even the dreaded paperwork. But in a world where your entire command-and-control structure might hinge on satellite access, bureaucracy starts to look a lot more like insurance.

The “conscience” comes in the form of predictable governance. IRIS² is a publicly funded initiative with a clear division of responsibilities. The European Space Agency handles development and launch logistics, while EUSPA (the EU Agency for the Space Program) manages operational services.

Decisions about who gets access, when, and under what terms will not be made in the middle of a livestream or via a 2 am X post.

It also reflects a broader philosophical stance: that strategic infrastructure, especially wartime communications, should not be left to the whims of a single CEO or the volatility of market forces.

IRIS² is a collective safeguard, designed to be resilient not just to jamming or cyberattacks, but to the kind of geopolitical whiplash that can come when your comms network is tied to a for-profit venture with conflicting global interests.

In that sense, IRIS² is a declaration that the future of European defense communications will be governed by treaties, not egos, and that Ukraine deserves a seat at that table.

Andrius Kubilius, EU Commissioner for Defense and Space, has now surprised everyone by announcing that European third countries such as Norway, Ukraine, and the UK could also join the network.

Ukraine: A Perfect Fit for IRIS²

Unlike many prospective partners, Ukraine isn’t entering this conversation with theoretical capabilities or polite interest. It’s bringing battlefield urgency, real-world feedback, and a deep bench of engineering talent forged in the furnace of necessity.

For starters, Ukraine has the technical chops. Decades as the USSR’s aerospace brain trust left behind more than just dusty blueprints and half-built rocket stages. Ukraine’s legacy includes a highly educated workforce and surviving institutions like Yuzhnoye Design Office and the Institute of Space Research, many of which pivoted quickly in wartime to support secure comms, satellite imagery analysis, and counter-UAV operations.

The country has quietly become one of the most battle-hardened proving grounds for space-adjacent technologies on Earth.

But what really makes Ukraine a natural fit is what it needs and what it’s willing to contribute. IRIS² is being built for secure, resilient connectivity in hostile environments.

Ukraine is, quite literally, the testbed for that mission. Whether it’s routing encrypted comms around Russian jamming, syncing drone strikes with satellite imagery, or maintaining battlefield cohesion during blackouts, Ukraine already operates like a future IRIS² customer, just without the login credentials.

And unlike more traditional partners, Ukraine has little interest in bureaucratic theater. Its value proposition is crystal clear: it can offer real-time feedback from an active combat zone, help validate systems under pressure, and shape IRIS² into something useful not just in Brussels power lunches, but on the snow-covered trench lines of the Donbas.

Few nations can help stress-test a space-based communications network while under daily missile attack. Ukraine can.

Lastly, there’s the political optics. Inviting Ukraine to join IRIS² is not just smart from a capabilities standpoint; it’s a message. It says the EU sees Ukraine not as a charity case or a temporary refugee of geopolitics, but as a future stakeholder in the continent’s strategic autonomy.

It signals trust, commitment, and a shared future. And in return, Europe gets a partner who understands, more than anyone, what’s at stake when your comms network goes dark and your enemy doesn’t.

Starlink vs IRIS². So, how do these two systems stack up against one another?

On paper, Starlink is hard to beat. Over 7,000 satellites, fast rollout, plug-and-play ground terminals, and near-global coverage.

But it comes with baggage.

Since 2022, Ukraine has had to tiptoe around Musk’s erratic political leanings, sudden outages, and ambiguous access policies. In one notorious instance, Musk limited access to prevent a Ukrainian attack on Russian ships, a foreign policy decision made unilaterally by a guy who once sold flamethrowers for fun.

Hell, just last week, Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight, part of a global issue that disrupted the satellite internet provider.

Ukrainian commanders reported halting or abandoning operations altogether due to losing the ability to communicate.

Compare that with IRIS²: a secure, treaty-bound, multi-national constellation backed by €10.6 billion in combined public and private investment. There’s no risk of European Parliament meetings being held on X. No memes deciding mission-critical infrastructure. IRIS² will be a system governed by policy, not personality.

That’s a huge difference when lives are on the line.

And while Starlink’s militarized cousin, Starshield, is supposedly coming, it’s still proprietary and American. That limits how far it can go in serving NATO partners, or countries at war, without sparking diplomatic headaches.

Look, Starlink is fast, cheap, and brilliant. But IRIS² is structured, secure, and accountable. And that’s exactly what Ukraine needs if it wants to stop playing roulette with its comms infrastructure.

Strategic Autonomy in Orbit

There’s a larger narrative here too, one that fits neatly into the broader European pivot toward defense sovereignty. The war in Ukraine exposed Europe’s dependency on American tech giants, whether for drones, chips, or satellite bandwidth.

Musk’s leash on Starlink in Ukraine made that dependency uncomfortably obvious.

IRIS² is Europe’s counterpunch. It’s a constellation for a continent that finally realizes soft power only gets you so far when tanks are rolling through someone else’s backyard. The EU wants secure comms, military-grade data pipes, and the ability to project digital power without borrowing someone else’s network.

That’s what IRIS² offers. And if Ukraine joins? Even better. It becomes not only the proving ground but also the crucible of future European defense infrastructure.

Now, the hard truth. IRIS² won’t be fully operational until 2030. Ukraine can’t exactly hit pause on the war and wait five years. In the meantime, Germany is footing the bill for Ukraine’s use of the more expensive Eutelsat OneWeb system.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a start. Ukraine is already decoupling from Starlink’s dominance, bit by orbital bit.

I’m also aware that satellites, more generally, are not as untouchable as they once were. Hell, I just wrote about scientific experiments meant to lessen our reliance on satellite navigation.

But this doesn’t mean satellites are going away completely.

Ukraine needs IRIS². And IRIS² needs Ukraine. Together, they create a communications system that’s democratic, secure, and, perhaps most importantly, not subject to the Twitter feed of a guy who named his kid after a wingdings password.

Musk’s Starlink may have won the first round, but if Europe wants IRIS² to matter, it has to launch faster than the headlines fade.

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