Russia’s war on Ukraine has a repeating feature – when one side marches two steps forward, the enemy is sure to follow.
That’s how it was last year with Russian glide bombs and medium-range drones, and so it has been this year with Ukraine’s long-range air strikes and its newfound monopoly on the Starlink satellite system.
Russia is now throwing huge resources into catching up. The bad news is that it has made significant progress; the good news is that it’s not yet nearly enough to counter Ukraine’s advantages.
In February, Russia was cut off from using Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite broadband network, on the battlefield, even as Ukraine maintained its access. As a result, Russian units started experiencing communications failures, some assault operations stalled, and coordination between troops and drones was disrupted. In the following weeks, Ukrainian forces regained ground in the southeast, with the Starlink shutdown assessed as one factor behind Russia’s temporary communications problems and corresponding battlefield losses.
The military costs were sufficiently serious for the Kremlin to accelerate an alternative. The hoped-for solution is apparently Rassvet, a low-Earth-orbit broadband satellite constellation to be deployed to low-Earth-orbit, developed by Russia’s Bureau 1440, a nominally-private sector satellite communications company in Russia, operating with significant integration into Kremlin programs of priority to the state.
Indeed, the project is closely tied to the Russian state through satellite production subsidies and launches organized through the Ministry of Defense space body, while reports suggest that Bureau 1440 established a subsidiary entity in Belarus in late 2022, evidently aimed at evading Western export controls on critical space technology systems and components.
Russia launched 16 production satellites in March and another 16 in July. That would have created at least two daily connectivity windows over Ukraine, each potentially lasting more than an hour, according to Ukrainian satellite communications specialist Volodymyr Stepanets. A second batch in another orbital plane would gradually add further windows of coverage.
That would represent very grim news for Ukraine, which is already suffering severe, daily strikes from ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones against Kyiv and other cities. A reliable Russian satellite constellation would greatly aid frontline operations and mid-range strikes on military logistics, as well as Ukrainian civil energy and critical infrastructure installations. It would tip the scales back toward the Kremlin.
But not yet, because there have been two significant developments. One results from Russian technical ineptitude and the other from the Ukrainian armed forces.
The satellites have not worked well. Designed to operate at or above 870 km (about 540 miles), the space vehicles have struggled to reach the right operating height. Only a few of the first 16 failed to reach the designated height, and none of the second 16 did so. At least one has already been destroyed as it fell back into Earth’s atmosphere, and others are reportedly expected to do the same via orbital decay.
The struggling constellation may still work, but inefficiently. As the Institute for the Study of War noted, roughly 12 of the initial satellite launch batch from earlier this year have reached proper orbit and could provide Russian forces operating ground terminals in Ukraine with as much as 90 minutes of coverage to assault the country.
While Russian haste has caused real operational issues for Rassvet, the Kremlin also continues to be haunted by smart Ukrainian military and intelligence planners, who have been taking the fight to Russia’s space-related industrial base.
In June, Ukrainian forces struck the Dubna and Vladimir space communications centers. Then, on August 15, Ukraine hit the RKC Progress in Samara, the manufacturer of the Soyuz-2 rockets used to launch Rassvet satellites. Eight days later, Ukrainian forces reportedly attempted to strike the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, the launch site for both Rassvet production batches. The results are unclear, although Ukraine claimed the RKC Progress attack caused a 5,000 sq. meter fire.
All of which is good news for Kyiv, although it won’t be enough to stop the Russian program. Despite decades of government experience in space operations dating back to the Sputnik era of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin has severely underinvested and under-innovated and has nothing resembling the current US space innovation economy. And this will continue to have severe consequences on Russian military efficacy should the lagging investment continue.
Rassvet, with its currently extremely intermittent coverage and weaker network, could still be far from Starlink, but it does have one advantage Moscow never had with SpaceX — sovereign control.
Ukraine has seen the risk and is doing all it can to strike the system before it reaches space. The objective must be to slow its expansion, interfere with its use, and ensure that Ukraine maintains the technological edge on the battlefield through the use of more advanced and well-deployed instrumentation like Starlink.
To disrupt Rassvet, Ukraine needs to continue its focus on striking key Russian space infrastructure: ground stations that connect the constellation to terrestrial networks, field terminals used by Russian forces, and the facilities that produce, launch, and support the system.
The second priority should be electronic warfare. Ukraine will need dedicated countermeasures to interfere with Rassvet while the constellation is still small. As Russia adds more satellites and coverage improves, disrupting the system at scale will only become harder.
The third pressure point remains the industrial base. The United States, EU, the UK, and other G7 partners should identify Rassvet’s foreign components and tighten restrictions on the equipment the program needs, including advanced microelectronics, critical materials, space launch components, and semiconductor manufacturing and testing equipment. Many of these categories are already listed under G7 export controls on Russia, and export controls officials on both sides of the Atlantic need to continue to slam shut workarounds allowing these materials, components, and systems to reach the Russian space sector
Finally, Ukraine (and its European allies) need to draw the same lesson from Rassvet that Russia drew from Starlink: control over communications infrastructure matters in wartime. Ukraine cannot simply assume permanent access to one foreign commercial provider. It should work with European partners to secure access to European satellite communications alongside Starlink and other systems to create a diversified portfolio of space-based satellite-based links.
Europe is already moving in that direction. EU GOVSATCOM became operational in 2026, giving EU governments access to shared secure satellite communications. The EU is also deploying IRIS², a planned 348-satellite network, to provide its own secure connectivity. Ukraine should seek the closest possible integration with this emerging European communications system, while bolstering its own resilient military communications.
Rassvet will undoubtedly continue to be developed and deployed by Russia and thus will probably not disappear. So, the goal should instead be to keep it intermittent, expensive, vulnerable, and difficult to scale for as long as possible, while ensuring that Ukraine and Europe possess resilient satellite communications that do not depend on an adversary’s technology or a single company’s permission.
Sofia Slonovska is a CEPA Editorial Intern and a graduate of Bard College Berlin, where she studied politics, economics, and social thought. Ukrainian-born, her research interests include European security, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and transatlantic relations.
Dr. Benjamin L. Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis, co-founder of the Duke University Space Diplomacy Lab, and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. (Twitter: @BLSchmitt).
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
