Yesterday, Soloviev came out with some fantastic nonsense about the ‘Russophobia’ of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence (!) and Starlink - it’s worth listening to the whole thing (English subtitles)
https://video.echelon.pl/w/u6awSQ7YG1ADEpECXDd6wz - but it is also a good excuse to remind on what legal basis Starlink actually works in the Russian army. Well, as is often the case… on none. Starlink has no legal basis in the Russian army and operates illegally, as Russian military analysts have been quick to point out.
Both
#Starlink and
#OneWeb attempted to legally enter the Russian market in 2017-2018 but were blocked by the FSB and
#Roscosmos, which announced the construction of its own Skif system. Dmitry
#Rogozin, as head of Roscosmos, spoke at length at the time about Starlink being a Pentagon agency and made many grandiose announcements about the launch of a Russian system that would be a hundred times better. It is not difficult to guess that, as is often the case in Russia, it ended with grandiose announcements and none of the several hundred satellites were launched into orbit.
The Skif programme itself was shut down last year, but it was replaced by a new programme called Rassvet (dawn), which was supposed to have 16 low-orbit satellites in space by 2025, but has… zero. Russian military experts themselves write about this with some regret, pointing out that the FSB and Roscosmos, with their ‘dog in the manger’ approach, have deprived their army of the opportunity to make normal use of Starlink. Yes, that “Pentagon surveillance stations”, on which Russian army today relies.
This ‘normal’ use of Starlink by the RF army is, of course, a bit far-fetched because, apart from the lack of a Russian licence, there are also Western sanctions . Musk recently explained that the famous incident when Starlink cut off communication with a Ukrainian naval drone near Crimea was due to American sanctions and not the ill will of the company itself, which risked legal consequences if it had tolerated an unknown terminal operating in the sanctioned territory of occupied Crimea at the time.
In summary, as of 2026, the Russian army widely uses Starlink devices purchased privately by Russians in the West and literally carried in their luggage to Russia, where they operate on the basis of private subscriptions in a manner that is completely illegal from the point of view of Russian law and semi-legal from the point of view of Starlink, which, after all, has no right to operate on Russian territory, but most of them are concentrated on the front line, i.e. effectively on Ukrainian territory.
And the Russians could probably continue to use them if it weren’t for the fact that Rubicon began installing Starlink on drones carrying out deep strikes on Ukrainian territory, including power plants and an exceptionally heinous attack on a civilian bus near Pavlohrad, where a real-time controlled ‘Geran’ drone with Starlink killed 16 miners. Starlink began by introducing restrictions on fast-moving terminals, 90% of which are drones, and is now working with the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence on a ‘white list’ of terminals belonging to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which should eliminate all Russian terminals operating in the frontline zone.
Why wasn’t this done earlier? Because some of the Ukrainian terminals were also imported privately and were not always registered with the Ministry of Defence for various reasons, so Russian terminals were actually tolerated for convenience, but now this should come to an end.
If this comes to fruition, the Russians will be left empty-handed, despite Rogozin’s grand announcements about a ‘hundred times better’ Russian system, which has only one drawback: it does not exist.
