Hey friends,
Russia spent four years jamming, jailing, and complaining about Starlink. Then in February, it lost access to it, and discovered it couldn’t fight without it. If you remember, this was the turning point earlier this year where it finally felt like Ukraine has the upper hand.
Now Moscow is trying to build its own Starlink and the first satellite already fell out of the sky.
The day Russia lost its own warfighting network
SpaceX doesn’t operate in Russia. Never did.
What Russian units did instead was quietly acquire Starlink terminals through intermediaries and third countries and fold them straight into frontline operations, eventually mounting some on long-range attack drones so operators could steer them by video feed in real time instead of trusting a preprogrammed flight path.
At the time, several outlets reported that Russian forces had been running thousands of these unauthorized connections.
Ukraine noticed, built a registration system through Kyiv’s Diia app to whitelist its own legitimate terminals, and worked with SpaceX to shut off everything that wasn’t on the list.
On February 5, Elon Musk confirmed the unauthorized access had been cut. What happened next was comical.
Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov, now electronic-warfare adviser to Zelensky, said, “All command of the troops has collapsed. Assault operations have been stopped in many areas.”
Three Ukrainian frontline sources told Western outlets the disruption looked significant. Russian milbloggers, who rarely miss a chance to complain, spent that week complaining about exactly this.
Now, “collapse” is a bit of strong word here… Russia still had VHF and HF radios, fiber lines, mesh networks, couriers, the whole analog toolkit a military has been falling back on since before satellites existed.
Russian Deputy Defense Minister Aleksei Krivoruchko told state television two weeks later that the shutdown hadn’t affected drone effectiveness at all, but that’s also what you expect a Russian deputy defense minister to say regardless of what was actually happening on the ground.
What’s not in dispute is the scale of Russia’s new problem.
A voice radio can tell a commander that somebody spotted a Ukrainian vehicle. Starlink could send the drone footage, the coordinates, the map update, and the targeting handoff between a reconnaissance unit and a strike unit, all at once, with low enough latency that the video was still useful by the time somebody looked at it.
Russia lost the bandwidth that let it fight the way a modern, drone-saturated army needs to fight. Beskrestnov later told Defense Express that the shutdown quietly wrecked Russia’s plans to expand its own Black Sea drone fleet in 2026, because it turned out Starlink was the only communications link that actually worked for naval drones operating off the Ukrainian coast.
Whoopsie. The lesson here? Don’t rely on your fucking adversary’s communications infrastructure.
Every domestic alternative Russian engineers tried either failed outright or proved too unreliable to trust with an attack boat.
Meet Rassvet
Russia’s answer to Starlink is a company called Bureau 1440, employing several thousand engineers, and building a constellation named Rassvet, “daybreak,” after the number of orbits Sputnik made on its first flight.
It’s actually an ambitious system. Bureau 1440 advertises an 800-kilometer operating altitude, gigabit-class speeds, sub-70-millisecond latency, laser links between satellites, and direct 5G connections to ordinary handsets, essentially each satellite acting as a cell tower in orbit.
The company’s long-term goal is somewhere north of 900 satellites by 2035, with an initial operational threshold of a few hundred targeted for next year.
