Russia Muting Musk’s Starlink Satellites Using Sophisticated Electronic Warfare Tools
Principles of operation of the Borshchevik, showing its capabilities in an urban environment (left) open fields and wooded areas (right). English-language translation of original Russian text.
11:35 GMT 26.03.2024
By Oleg Burunov
The Russian military possesses perhaps the most comprehensive, multilayered and multi-domain electronic warfare capabilities in the world, using an array of short, medium, long and ultra-long range systems to effect throughout the course of the proxy war with NATO in Ukraine.
The Russian military continues to ramp up its ability to disrupt the Starlink internet capabilities Ukraine’s troops use to coordinate their forces, collect intel and launch drone attacks on Russian frontline positions, causing mass “outages” in the Kharkov area of the front and playing a role in the rapid pace of Russia’s recent advances.
That’s according to Ukrainian officials, soldiers and electronic warfare specialists queried by the New York Times to find out why Russia’s EW operations had slowed frontline troops’ ability to communicate using Starlink internet to a crawl, forcing troops to resort to simple text messages.
NYT warned that if Russia’s massed efforts to disrupt Starlink “continue to succeed, it could mark a tactical shift in the conflict, highlighting Ukraine’s vulnerability and dependence on the service provided by Mr. Musk’s company,” while raising “broader questions about Starlink’s reliability against a technically sophisticated adversary.”
“We’re losing the electronic warfare fight,” a deputy commander from the Ukrainian 92ndAssault Brigade’s drone battalion told the newspaper. “One day before the attacks, it just shut down. It became super, super slow,” he complained.
A Ukrainian drone operator confirmed the connectivity issues. “During the first hours the front line was very dynamic. The enemy was moving. And we were moving as well. We needed to be to be fast in communicating,” the soldier said, complaining that the loss of Starlink connectivity “made everything more complicated” and “time consuming.”
The investigation comes amid reports that Starlink recently de-activated some of the equipment smuggled into South Africa, but that terminals were then re-registered in a country like Malawi and reactivated.
This followed SpaceX tweeting in February that if the company “obtains knowledge that a Starlink terminal is being used by a sanctioned or unauthorized party, SpaceX officials investigate the claim and take actions to deactivate the terminal if confirmed.”
The Biden administration is meanwhile mulling tightening Starlink-related export controls that keep them out of the hands of US adversaries, according to Bloomberg.
In an interview with the news outlet, Emma Shortis, a senior researcher in international and security affairs at the Canberra- based Australia Institute think tank, voiced deep concern over the results of the probe.
“It’s unregulated and headed by a private company. There’s no accountability on who has access to it and how it’s being used,” she added in an apparent nod to Starlink.
Shortis was echoed by Candace Johnson, director at Montreal-based NorthStar Earth & Space Inc., who told Bloomberg that, “There needs to be more accountability: to your country, to your company, to your shareholders, to your stakeholders.”
The news outlet pointed to Starlink’s effectiveness as a communications tool, which makes it “such a sensitive matter.”
SpaceX provided the technology to the Kiev regime in the early days of the Russian special military operation, but last year, Musk made it clear that the Ukrainian Army would not be allowed to use the Starlink services for combat purposes, and that they were only intended for commercial terminals.
Last month, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, for his part, responded to Kiev’s allegations about Moscow’s usage of Starlink by stressing that SpaceX communication terminals are not supplied to Russia and cannot be "officially used.”
The Starlink project, aimed to blanket the surface of the Earth with low-latency internet, began launching small satellites into low-Earth orbit in 2019. To date, the Starlink constellation consists of over 5,000 satellites, while the goal is to use about 43,000.
https://sputnikglobe.com/20240524/russia-muting-musks-starlink-satellites-using-sophisticated-electronic-warfare-tools-1118614899.html