Before Kremlin troops and tanks began crashing across Russia’s borders, before their missiles started setting Ukraine’s cities and cathedrals afire, their leaders launched a clandestine mission they believed would help bring swift victory in a lightning war.
Russia’s notorious military intelligence directorate executed a cyber-ambush that played out almost perfectly: hitting the ground stations of an American satellite network that Ukraine’s president and heads of defense depended on to communicate with each other and command their soldiers.
The stealth attack speedily destroyed tens of thousands of Viasat modems, jeopardizing vital lifelines connecting Kyiv with its defenders across the nation, and with allies around the world.
Isolating Ukraine’s top commanders inside a digital Iron Curtain as Russia’s tanks aimed to capture the capital, with a blare of rockets targeting television and telecommunications towers, was part of a massive mission to smother the embattled democracy’s guardians in “the fog of war,” says Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability at the Washington-based think tank Secure World Foundation.
Central to that mission was destroying Kyiv’s links to the American constellation that provided the president and his security council with internet coverage, and the ability to coordinate Ukraine’s resistance, Samson, one of the top space defense experts in the U.S., told me in an interview.
The Russian military’s laser focus on quickly crushing Kyiv’s ability to tap leading-edge space technologies, she says, was recently highlighted in a chronicle compiled by her confrères at the Center for Naval Analyses.
These CNA scholars, after scouring treatises and orders issued across the Russian military sphere, reported that “controlling access to space‑based information is seen as conferring enormous advantage in terms of … enhanced warfighting capability.”
Russia’s upper-echelon defense strategists also believe it is imperative to destroy an enemy’s space-related ground infrastructure “during the initial period of war, when both sides are likely to preempt with, in Russian parlance, an ‘information strike’ to disable adversary command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” the CNA experts add in their report, “The Role of Space in Russia’s Operations in Ukraine.”
The overarching importance the Kremlin’s generals place on obliterating an adversary’s space technologies at the very start of a conflict explains Russia’s tightly synchronized invasions of Viasat’s network and of Ukraine’s territory – neither of which was heavily guarded.
“Russian forces did deliberately attack the Viasat terminals in an effort to interrupt Ukrainian military communications as they invaded Ukraine,” Samson told me. “Russia has never officially admitted it was behind the attacks but the U.S. and its EU partners formally declared it to be the case in May 2022.” The British Foreign Secretary, after charging “Russian Military Intelligence” with organising the cyber-blitzkrieg, vowed it would face “severe repercussions.”
Back in Moscow, Kremlin celebrations over trapping Kyiv’s leaders inside an information black hole, even as its armoured battle group crept toward the capital, were abruptly abandoned.
In an operation that resembled the Berlin Airlift, Elon Musk began rushing tens of thousands of Starlink stations into Ukraine, plugging the country back into the World Wide Web via his broadband-beaming satellites circling the globe.
Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs, creators of cutting-edge imaging satellites, began flooding Ukraine’s presidential palace, and the world’s leading newsrooms, with high-resolution panoramic photographs – shot from space – of the Russian line of tanks stalled outside Kyiv, of mass graves that began appearing across Russian-occupied villages, and of the shellshocked cities bombarded by Moscow’s missiles.
The Russians were furious.
Vladimir Putin began dispatching his envoys to UN gatherings to threaten his Space Forces could begin shooting down American satellites aiding Ukraine.
But then the hopelessness of that target must have become clear to the Russian leadership, Samson says.
While the Soviet Union once vied with its American arch-enemy to loft sophisticated missile-tracking satellites into orbit, Russia under Putin – where massive official corruption stretches from the Kremlin to its cosmodromes – now fields less than 200 satellites – compared with more than 6000 launched by SpaceX alone.
At the same time, Russia is remarkably behind the U.S. and other NATO nations, and even Ukraine, when it comes to integrating space technology into its military operations, says James Clay Moltz, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
“They did not prepare for an extended conflict against an adversary that had access to more overhead information than they did,” Professor Moltz told me in an interview. “The Russian military still seems to be facing an information gap, due to the limits of its constellations and its lack of access to Western commercial imagery.”
Despite the successful assault on Viasat’s ground terminals, he says, Russia has failed to achieve its top objective – denying the Ukrainian military access to space-derived information.
“Russia clearly did not anticipate the cooperation Ukraine would receive from Western countries and commercial services, which Russia cannot access,” says Professor Moltz, who has written a series of captivating books on competition between the great space powers around the world, including “Asia’s Space Race” and “The Politics of Space Security”.
While issuing a barrage of threats to hit Western satellites coming to Ukraine’s aid – which would likely target SpaceX, Planet and Maxar – Putin’s inner circle of defense chiefs likely came to the conclusion that “destroying one or two Western satellites with the ASAT weapon it tested in November 2021” would do virtually nothing to reverse Russia’s falling far behind American space power.
Rather than aiming its missiles at SpaceX spacecraft, Moscow has instead launched them against Starlink stations scattered across Ukraine, and against Dnipro, the space center long called Ukraine’s “Rocket City.”
Professor Moltz says Dnipro has been pummelled by Russian rockets over the last two years, with its Yuzhmash spacecraft workshop apparently directly targeted.
David Burbach, a professor at the Naval War College, says in a prescient article, “Early lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war as a space conflict,” that: “The Russia–Ukraine war is perhaps the first two-sided space war” in human history.
Professor Moltz agrees: “Yes, this is the first two-sided space war, and Ukraine is ahead because of its partners.”
This Space War 1, he predicts, could be a precursor to technologically sophisticated space clashes of the future between the superpowers.
If any sizeable missile battles erupt in these projected celestial conflicts, he adds, low Earth orbit could be rendered uninhabitable for human explorers.
Yet that is exactly the future envisaged by some of Russia’s leading space commissars.
The co-authors of the CNA space chronicle quote Colonel General V. B. Zarudnitsky, who heads the Russian military’s General Staff Academy, as forecasting that times ahead will hold “new forms of warfare in outer space, in particular, anti-satellite combat, systemic military operations to destroy state infrastructure facilities, orbital satellite battle, [and] anti-space operations.”
