Russia and China Have a Plan to Disable Starlink Over Ukraine

Russia and China have developed a coordinated plan to disable SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network over Ukraine, EUobserver reported Wednesday, as the conflict enters its 1,604th day and extends into a new operational domain: space.

The report marks a qualitative shift in how the two governments are approaching the war’s technological dimension. Previous Russian efforts to degrade Starlink access have been largely unilateral — ground-based jamming systems that SpaceX repeatedly countered through software updates. A coordinated effort with China would bring a broader set of technical capabilities to bear and could prove harder to defeat through commercial countermeasures alone.

Why Starlink Is a Target

Starlink has served as a critical communications backbone for Ukrainian military and civilian operations since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Ukrainian forces have integrated the terminals into virtually every level of their order of battle — battalion-level coordination, drone piloting, artillery fire control, and logistics networks all depend on the constellation’s low-latency links.

That dependence is also a vulnerability. Concentrated reliance on a single commercial provider creates a single point of failure, and both Russia and China have long-standing programs aimed at denying adversaries access to space-based assets in wartime. Starlink’s scale — several thousand operational satellites — makes kinetic destruction impractical, but jamming, spoofing, and directed-energy disruption remain on the table.

What Russia and China Bring

Both governments have invested heavily in counter-space capabilities. Russia’s program includes ground-based jamming systems with demonstrated ability to interfere with satellite communications, as well as kinetic anti-satellite weapons. China has developed parallel directed-energy and electronic warfare systems with potential counter-space applications, alongside extensive ground-based sensor networks for space domain awareness.

EUobserver’s report suggests these parallel programs have moved toward coordination. The shared objective — degrading Western-supplied satellite infrastructure supporting Ukraine — aligns with both governments’ stated interest in limiting the war’s outcome for NATO and its partners.

The reported collaboration fits a broader pattern of deepening Russia-China strategic alignment. China has maintained close economic ties with Moscow throughout the war while providing dual-use technology exports that Western governments have argued supports Russia’s war economy. Beijing has denied supplying direct military equipment.

Ukraine’s Exposure

SpaceX has shown considerable agility in hardening Starlink against Russian interference, pushing software updates that restore connectivity after jamming events. But a multi-domain counter-space campaign backed by China’s industrial and technical capacity would test the limits of that agility.

Ukraine’s exposure is compounded by recent turbulence inside its defense establishment. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week dismissed Defense Minister Rustem Umerov in a government reshuffle, according to NPR’s reporting. Umerov had been credited with deepening Ukraine’s drone and technology procurement relationships, and his departure arrives at a moment when the technological competition with Russia is intensifying.

Ukraine has sought to reduce single-point vulnerabilities in its communications networks throughout the war, but Starlink’s performance advantage over alternatives has made full diversification difficult.

The Broader War Context

The space dimension is emerging alongside, not instead of, the conventional air campaign. Russian missile strikes on Kyiv killed two people and wounded dozens earlier this week, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko. On the ground, Russia continues to advance at high cost with limited territorial returns — a recent analysis found that Kremlin claims of capturing Ukrainian towns have repeatedly been contradicted by geolocated evidence.

The EU-Ukraine drone development agreement, reported earlier Wednesday, reflects a parallel effort to reduce Ukraine’s dependence on any single Western supplier for battlefield technology. The same logic applies to satellite communications, though an alternative to Starlink at comparable scale does not currently exist.

What the Alliance Response Looks Like

NATO governments have flagged counter-space threats as a growing priority. The United States Space Force, established in 2019, was built specifically to address threats to satellite infrastructure from peer and near-peer adversaries. Allied investment in satellite redundancy, space domain awareness, and on-orbit resilience has accelerated since the 2022 invasion demonstrated the operational stakes.

Whether the U.S. government or SpaceX would respond to a coordinated Russia-China counter-Starlink effort with additional hardening, alternative constellations, or direct military deterrence measures is an open question. The EUobserver report puts it squarely on the table.

The conflict’s extension into space also sets a precedent with implications beyond Ukraine: it signals that commercial satellite networks are now considered legitimate targets in great-power conflict, and that the threshold for coordinated counter-space operations has been crossed by at least two nuclear-armed states.