For months, Ukrainians had been quietly campaigning for SpaceX to allow the government of the embattled country to control who can use Starlink terminals in Ukraine’s territory. It was a matter of life and death as evidence kept mounting that Russia was buying Starlink terminals on the black market, using them to guide deep strike drones to hit civilian targets and infrastructure in Ukraine.

In early February, the deal was finally reached, a few days after reports had emerged that a Russian Geran drone fitted with a Starlink terminal hit a passenger train near Kharkiv, killing five people on board.

Ukraine’s Minister of Defence Mykhailo Fedorov publicly thanked Elon Musk and SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell for “their swift response” in a LinkedIn post, announcing the new registration initiative that requires all Starlink users in Ukraine to whitelist their devices with the government.

Without Starlink, Russian forces began to fumble, the momentum appearing to swing toward Ukraine.

"I think they lost 50% of their capacity for offence," a Ukrainian drone operator said. "That's what the numbers show. Fewer assaults, fewer enemy drones, fewer everything."

Starlink has played a key role in Ukraine’s ability to ward off the Russian invasion since the early months of the war. Shortly after the invasion on February 24th, 2022, SpaceX famously turned on Starlink services in Ukraine, dispatching thousands of satellite terminals to the post-Soviet republic to keep its troops and civilians online after the Russian army began destroying terrestrial internet infrastructure. Since then, access to Starlink has become a cornerstone of Ukraine’s defence and counter-offensive. At the same time, the reliance on an asset controlled by a single person — whimsical billionaire Elon Musk — is raising concerns not only in Ukraine, but also in Europe, which, according to analysts, may need to brace itself for a possible Russian attack in the coming years.

The conflict has ignited a race, with Ukraine and Russia in the lead, to develop alternatives to the SpaceX-owned megaconstellation.

Within weeks of the arrival of the first Starlink terminals in 2022, Ukrainians realized that the nimble devices, weighing around one kilogram each, could be mounted onto reconnaissance and kamikaze drones to extend their range.

Commercial drones, previously used by filmmakers and hobbyists, redefined war-fighting doctrines in Ukraine within months of the invasion. Those devices are by default controlled by radio-frequency links that have a range of only a few miles and are easily jammed. With Starlink, drones could cover distances of hundreds or thousands of kilometers. Since Starlink satellite links cannot be easily jammed, these drones are also hard to stop, providing a significant advantage to those who have access to the constellation’s connectivity.

Today, Ukraine is by far the largest user of Starlink terminals in the world. According to Ukrainian satcom expert Volodymyr Stepanets, some 250,000 terminals are active in the country. Out of that number, 100,000 are in the hands of the military. They are used to keep troops connected and to guide drones and ground robots across the grey zone, the ravaged no-man’s strip of land along the frontline.

Hundreds of devices are connecting to the constellation every day along the frontline, with the high demand creating bandwidth bottlenecks, diluting the constellation’s peak bandwidth of 200 Mbps to a mere 10 Mbps per terminal, affecting drone and robot mission execution.

No other system currently exists that could replace Starlink on drones. The Eutelsat-owned One Web low-Earth-orbit constellation lacks in capacity, featuring a mere 690 satellites compared to Starlink’s 10,000. On top of that, the most compact One Web terminals weigh in excess of 10 kilograms, way too much to be placed on a maneuverable drone, and cost in excess of $7,000 compared to the $300-$500 for a Starlink mini terminal, which makes them a no-go for single-use attack missions. Prices vary depending on where and when the Starlink device was purchased.

Old-school geostationary communication satellites, suspended above a fixed spot above the equator some 22,000 miles away from the planet, can offer connectivity to troops, but they suffer from signal delays that make it difficult to use them for drone control. The terminals designed to receive their signal, too, are way too clunky for lightweight UAVs.

Although Starlink services have never been enabled in Russia, the Russian military could, until early February, use the terminals along the frontline in Eastern Ukraine in the same way that Ukrainians do. Those terminals could be registered in other countries with the roaming setting switched on.

First reports of Russia attaching Starlink terminals to long-range attack Shahed drones date back to late 2024. Stepanets told Supercluster the situation had become increasingly serious by mid-2025, forcing Ukraine to campaign for a registration scheme that would allow only whitelisted terminals to operate in the country.

Anecdotal evidence that has emerged since the registration requirement shows how critical Starlink access is on the frontline. Unable to use their unregistered terminals, Russian soldiers were falling prey to a brazen Ukrainian phishing scheme. Pretending to offer Russian users the opportunity to register their terminals with the Ukrainian government via Ukrainian proxies, a group of Ukrainian cyber warriors extracted payments from the desperate Russian troops as well as locations, which were later used to guide drone and missile strikes.

Scrambling to restore frontline connectivity, Russia has deployed stratospheric balloons fitted with 5G communication terminals to connect troops and drones via relays in the stratosphere 12 miles above Earth’s surface. The project, called Barrazh-1, is, however, bound to face literal headwinds as the predominant atmospheric flow above Eastern Europe moves from west to east, meaning the balloons are likely to quickly drift deeper into Russian aerospace.

Iurii Vysoven, CEO of Ukrainian company Aerobabovna, which is producing tethered aerostats that serve as communication relays along the frontline, said in a blog post on the company’s website that such high-altitude platforms would be restricted “to short-duration operations” and would have a significantly limited “usefulness for military applications, particularly as a replacement for satellite communications.”

Russia is making up for the loss of Starlink for basic frontline connectivity and communications among troops with the use of its own geostationary satellite systems.

Russia’s Yamal satellite constellation currently consists of five satellites stationed above Russia and surrounding regions. Another satellite is expected to launch this year. The five satellites already in orbit have been purchased by Russia from the European manufacturer Thales Alenia Space years before the invasion of Ukraine.

According to available reports, the roll-out of Yamal terminals to replace Starlink on the battlefield has earned criticism from Russian troops. The antennas have been described as too large and hard to set up, and the data speeds are too slow to meet the needs.

Stepanets told Supercluster that Russia is believed to be conducting experiments with controlling drones through the newest satellite of the Yamal constellation, Yamal 601, launched in 2014.

“This is a very modern satellite with a good coverage that covers Europe too,” Stepanets said. “It has a good capacity and a good technological level.”

On top of that, Russia is already working on its own low-Earth-orbit communications constellation that could enable the control of drones in the absence of Starlink.

“They have managed to put into low Earth orbit an experimental formation of small satellites, which they are actually already testing,” Eugen Rokytsky, the CEO of the Ukrainian Innovation Spacetech Clusters Alliance, told Supercluster. “The sole purpose of this constellation is to control drones.”

The constellation, dubbed Rassvet, currently has three satellites in orbit, according to Gunter’s Space Page, all launched in 2023. However, according to available information, an additional 16 satellites are expected to be launched in the coming months. By 2027, the constellation could grow to over 300 spacecraft.

With these developments, Rokytsky remarked, Russia is leaping ahead of Europe in its ability to control battlefield assets without reliance on Starlink.

Ukraine is already taking its own steps to reduce its dependence on Starlink, having learned from the unpredictable mood changes of the Trump administration not to take access to U.S. technology for granted.

“We understand that our dependency on Starlink is a big vulnerability for us,” Stepanets said.

In collaboration with western partners, Ukraine has developed a dedicated geostationary satellite terminal, UASAT GEO, which, according to Stepanets, “provides an alternative for many use cases” on the battlefield and has already been tested on the front line.

Ukrainian technologists are also developing a concept of a Ukraine-led low-Earth-orbit constellation, UASAT LEO, to be built in cooperation with partners in Europe. The constellation, Stepanets said, will serve solely government and military users, with a demo satellite expected to reach space in late 2026.

The EU, in the meantime, has begun looking at the possibility of using the planned IRIS² low-Earth-orbit satellite constellation of around 300 satellites to enable drone control in the future, Nicolas Stassin, the Project Officer for Space and Space Situational Awareness at the European Defence Agency, told Supercluster. But that constellation will not begin launching before 2030, by which time, the war may have spread beyond Ukraine.

Fledgling providers in several European countries have begun looking at similar solutions, but Stepanets said that the available technology not only lags behind Starlink in terms of capacity but also comes at a price that prohibits deployment on single-use strike drones.

“The bandwidth is much lower, and the price is more than ten times higher, or more, than a Starlink terminal,” he said. “These products can provide good results in some areas, but the manufacturers lack the ability to scale and bring the price down.”

In the meantime, analysts warn Russia might be planning to take the war to EU-controlled territories within the next five years. In parallel, relations with the traditional guarantor of European security — the US — appear to be fracturing in the face of Donald Trump’s politics and his administration’s ambition to acquire Denmark-controlled Greenland. European nations have been pledging increased spending on space defence assets, but whether the continent moves fast enough to keep pace with Russia’s moves remains a question.

“Europe tries to be on the right timeline, but if we compare the analytic reports that are set in the timeline for the potential Russian attack and the deployment of the space assets, which is costly and time-consuming, there's definitely a mismatch,” Rokytsky said.