Together with Patriot missile interceptors, various tactical weapons and fighter jets, the nation’s access to Starlink internet and insights from fleets of Earth-observing satellites could be in question. What would such a loss mean for Ukraine?

On Palm Sunday, April 13, thousands of Ukrainians strolled to churches for pre-Easter celebrations in the north-eastern city of Sumy. Most were going to pray for an end to daily Russian air raids. It was meant to be a pleasant spring morning. But instead, two ballistic missiles hit the city center, killing 37 and injuring more than 130 others. It was a cynical reminder of the failing attempts of the Trump administration to secure a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. The attack was the deadliest in two years and took place only a few weeks before the final package of military aid approved by former President Joe Biden is set to run out.

The missiles that caused the Sumy carnage were the Iskander-M short-range rockets manufactured by Russia’s Machine-Building Design Bureau near Moscow. These missiles can only be shot down by the Patriots, the supply of which may soon be discontinued. The Patriots, however, are only a tip of an iceberg that is Ukraine’s reliance on U.S.-made tech.

Allegedly fired from the west-Russian Kursk region, the Iskander-M missiles appeared to have hit without a warning. Ukraine uses ground-based radar to detect incoming threats. To spot those following ballistic trajectories can, however, be tricky. The only other source of warning are thermal detectors on satellites of the U.S. military Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellite constellation, according to Reuters.

Analysts approached by Supercluster couldn’t confirm how much Ukraine relies on the U.S. for early missile warnings, as information about the SBIRS system’s use are not made public. But SBIRS is only one in a range of critical space technologies which Ukraine currently cannot replace either by its own or European assets. 

When the war broke out, Elon Musk famously responded to Twitter calls from Ukraine’s officials to switch on Starlink internet in Ukraine. At that time, it was a life saver, for the nation was about to plunge into internet darkness after Russia disrupted its ground-based and cellular networks. Since then, Starlink has become an integral component of the defense effort, the Ukrainians having quickly found new uses for its services. 

“Starlink was originally designed to provide internet access to civilians,” Pierre Lionnet, space economist and managing director at European space industry trade association Eurospace, told Supercluster. “That’s what we saw in Ukraine initially, but then the Ukrainians did something that nobody expected them to do — they started mounting Starlink terminals on drones and robots, using them to guide targeted assaults on the Russian forces.”

Most drones used in the war in Ukraine are the so-called first-person view (FPV) drones controlled by radio links. But satellite connectivity enables the unmanned vehicles to strike targets much deeper in the Russia-controlled territory. First such uses of Starlink in Ukraine were reported in mid-2022 with marine drones targeting Russia’s ships in the Black Sea. Musk was not amused. Citing concerns over escalation of the Ukrainian conflict into the Third World War, he allegedly toggled Starlink access in the Black Sea region. His commitment to the Ukrainian struggle has since cooled down. 

Since February, after relationships between the Trump administration and Ukraine deteriorated, Starlink access has allegedly been used as a bargaining chip to pressure Ukraine into a deal to allow America to extract the country’s rare minerals. 

Their trust in Musk’s company, however, has plummeted. The problem is that there is no-fully fledge alternative that could serve all the uses currently addressed by Starlink. Ukraine also reportedly has access to Starlink’s military upgrade called the Starshield, which provides secure, encrypted communications. 

“Once you put together these three use cases and ask yourself whether European assets could supply these three services, the answer is very much ‘no’,” said Lionnet.  

A combination of satellites in higher orbits owned by European nations and the Eutelsat One Web low-Earth-orbit constellation could provide connectivity for ground-forces and civilians, albeit with much reduced capacity. One Web, the only developed constellation similar to the Starlink concept, only has about 650 satellites in orbit compared to Starlink’s more than 7,000. With intense use, its available bandwidth would quickly thin out. There is also the issue of latency that plagues satellites in higher orbits, which limits the range of applications these satellites can support.

Clayton Swope, the deputy director and aerospace security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told Supercluster. “In practice, that would likely mean that most of this connectivity would be reserved for the military and there would be much less available for Ukrainian citizens.”

Lionnet points out that in addition to the reduced bandwidth, the One Web constellation and its terminals are much less suitable for use on lightweight drones and other unmanned vehicles than Starlink.

“The One Web antennas are bigger and heavier. They could be used on ships and planes but the use on drones is something that today cannot be replaced easily,” said Lionnet.

Equally irreplaceable are Earth observation satellites and constellations owned either by the U.S. government or U.S.-headquartered companies. In March, the Trump administration temporarily suspended Ukraine’s access to satellite imagery curated by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency as part of the Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery system. The service includes images captured by commercial companies Maxar Technologies, Planet and BlackSky, all of which have been indispensable for Ukraine to stay ahead of Russia’s movements. 

At the onset of the war, Maxar used to release images of the Russian troops’ progress as well as of the destruction on the ground. High-resolution data from Maxar’s ten satellites supplemented with high-frequency revisit lower-res images by Planet and other providers, enabled Ukrainian defense forces to view Russia’s advances nearly in real time. 

Although the U.S. government reinstated the data flow after a two-week pause, the threat of a permanent ban on intelligence data sharing looms large.

Just like with Starlink, Europe currently doesn’t have a fully-fledged alternative. The only full-grown Europe-based satellite imaging provider is Finland-headquartered ICEYE. Operating a fleet of over 40 synthetic aperture radar satellites, the company has multiple agreements with Ukraine to supply radar imagery that reveals the ground even through clouds and in darkness. 

High resolution optical images, such as those provided by Maxar Technologies, would be much harder to source in Europe, said Lionnet. Airbus operates its constellation of Pleiades Neo satellites, which provide images with a resolution of 30 centimeters. But there are only two of those satellites in orbit; two others plunged into the Atlantic in 2022 after a post-launch rocket failure. 

On top of that, Lionnet points out, the U.S. military itself has a “sheer amount of [Earth observation] satellite capacity” in orbit that is “absolutely unmatched in Europe.” According to publicly available information, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office operates at least 50 intelligence satellites. Overall, the U.S. military space fleet has nearly 250 spacecraft. In Europe, on the contrary, the four best equipped countries — France, Germany, UK and Italy — only have some 40 military satellites between them. If the U.S. government were to halt all intelligence data sharing, Ukraine’s near real-time view of the enemy’s moves would become patchy.

“Fewer satellites would mean longer revisit rates,” Swope said. “If you are trying to figure out what’s on the other side of that hill up ahead, it might take longer, or you might not have a way to figure that out at all. And that certainly could impact operations on the battlefield.”

Then there is the omnipresent, taken-for-granted Global Positioning System (GPS). It has been consistently making headlines throughout the war in Ukraine for the vulnerability of its signal to Russian jamming and spoofing.

Although Europe has an alternative in this case — the Galileo global navigation satellite system — Ukraine would still feel the complete loss of GPS painfully.

“The Galileo system is for civilian uses with the protected public service component for government users,” said Lionnet. “It would be able to provide some higher quality encrypted signal to the military, but it still is not able to do one thing that GPS does and that is weapon guidance.”

Ukraine uses U.S. GPS-guided missile systems such as HIMARS, ATACMS and GMLRS. The use of the mobile multi-rocket launcher HIMARS has been especially affected by GPS jamming, according to media reports.

Swope points out that effects of a GPS blackout would be felt beyond weaponry deployments. For too long, the world has been used to rely on GPS and switching to other constellation would come with a significant price tag. 

“If I have my iPhone or a system that is using GPS for timing and synchronization like in the energy of financial sectors, I don’t know whether these systems would be immediately ready to use those other constellations,” Swope says. “

Whether its civilian-built technology or upgraded military satellites, Ukraine’s defense without U.S. space support would be nearly impossible.