Satellite Wars over Ukraine

As Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine churns into a new phase with the passing of the one year anniversary of the Kremlin’s military offensive this week, the view from hundreds of miles above the battle-scarred Ukrainian countryside is not pretty. Russian forces are again on the offensive in the eastern region of Donbas where World War I-style trench warfare is playing out in and around the city of Bakhmut. But the fact that we can see anything at all so far from the line of fire in Ukraine is a testament to how much emerging technology and the commercialization of outer space is changing the character of conflict and geopolitical competition.

On almost every level, the situation today in Ukraine is a far cry from Russian president Vladimir Putin’s initial hopes for a Russian blitzkrieg and quick military victory. Kremlin-backed Wagner Group assassins failed to take out Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, and Russian plans to install a puppet regime have continued to meet stiff resistance from Ukrainians and their allies. On Sunday, Putin’s geopolitical foil U.S. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, turned the Kremlin’s dream into a nightmare by doubling down publicly on support for Ukraine with his surprise visit to the capital, Kyiv.

And, yet, it may be that information technology companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink and leaders of the commercial space sector like Maxar Technologies CEO Daniel Jablonsky hold just as much sway as heads of state over the trajectory of Russia’s clash with Ukraine and the West. Some of the most striking images coming out of the early first weeks of the war were those of a 40 mile-long Russian convoy, mired in traffic and beset on all sides by Ukrainian hit-and-run tactics. The existence of the convoy—direct evidence of Putin’s stalled offensive—became known to the world thanks to satellites owned by Maxar, a Colorado-based company that recently won a multimillion dollar contract to provide satellite imagery to U.S. allies.

Big tech companies, national and local governments, international organizations, NGOs, and individuals are all competing to shape the way the world accesses, stores, and shares information. In so doing, they are remaking norms and institutions that were once so central to the world order. In many cases, they are also rendering them irrelevant or inapplicable. The digital revolution is not only transforming how we think about truth, facts, and evidence, but most importantly it is changing the very essence of power and influence. Most importantly in the near term for Ukraine, tech and open source intelligence is redefining what we mean when we talk about frontlines.

Maxar and Musk’s Starlink are among a group of companies operating high above the battlefield, helping to keep Ukraine free and sovereign. But American commercial space companies are not alone in trying to serve as a battlefield equalizer in the war, as demonstrated by recent revelations that Russia-backed Wagner Group fighters have purchased satellite imagery services from a Chinese startup. In low-Earth orbit, hundreds of satellites make vital contributions to the war by keeping a watchful eye on combatants on both sides of the conflict.

With the help of a growing, emergent sector of private-sector satellite startups engaged in commercial remote sensing (CRS), Ukraine has cobbled together a high-impact constellation of spy satellites without having its own space launch program. Information collected by commercial satellite companies has helped Ukraine run a high-tech resistance empowered by near real-time data on the disposition of Russian forces in the field, logistical activities deep in Russian territory, and the geolocations of Russian radio transmissions and GPS jammers. Ukraine and a host of other civilian actors like the Conflict Observatory at Yale University are further leveraging these capabilities to document potential war crimes carried out by Russia. Commercial satellites have become such a game changer that Russia has accused the West of illegally blurring the line between the military and civilian realms and threatened to shoot them down with anti-satellite weapons.

As demonstrated by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent diplomatic outreach to Musk over Starlink’s controversial decision to restrict Ukraine’s access to its satellite internet services, commercial space providers hold an important stake in the conduct of war. The rise of these companies and the ways in which they have helped Ukraine demonstrate how a confluence of disparate technologies can impact geopolitics in unexpected (and unintended) ways. Ultimately, this emerging paradigm may point the way for others. Taiwan, for example, is reportedly building out its capabilities in anticipation of a potential clash with China.

Satellites and launches that used to cost billions now can be had for millions, meaning space-based intelligence gathering is no longer an activity exclusively for governments. Commercial satellite companies have achieved domain dominance by integrating information and communications tools and applications into aerospace technologies in groundbreaking new ways that are helping us remap our understanding of Earth. Specifically, these technologies are electronics miniaturization, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cheap space launches.

Satellite firms are making their collection available to private citizens, NGOs, corporations, and governments for uses like business intelligence, atrocity prevention, and non-proliferation. They archive a global dataset each day that allows users to divine insight from visual changes over time. “Quantitative” hedge funds are using AI object-recognition algorithms to count cars in Wal-Mart parking lots as a means of estimating same-store sales metrics. These funds also use satellites to count shipping containers to estimate port activity and monitor petroleum depots to measure levels of oil in storage.

NGOs used imagery to prove the Burmese Army was bulldozing Rohingya villages and committing atrocities. A think tank showed that, in the wake of the first Trump-Kim summit, North Korea had done nothing to scale back its ballistic missile program and was actually hiding sixteen new ballistic missile facilities. A satellite company showed that Chinese fishing vessels were going “dark” and turning off their identification beacons to conduct illegal poaching off the coast of South America.

The explosion of growth in the commercial space and satellite technology sector has seen annual market revenues for related services balloon to $2.7 billion, according to at least one estimate. Among the industries two biggest clients are NASA and the secretive Virginia-based National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA. NGA gets most of its intelligence from a constellation of government-owned school-bus sized satellites, but the agency has increasingly come to rely on multimillion-dollar, subscription-based contracts to produce geospatial intelligence products, or GEOINT, as it is better known in the spy world.

The NGA has also acted as a conduit for commercial collection to get to Ukraine, getting some 40 million square kilometers of data into Ukrainian hands during the first two weeks of the conflict. In the lead up to the war, as geopolitical analysts tried to guess at a date-certain for a Russian invasion, satellite companies demonstrated their potential value by releasing information about Putin’s forces building up along the Russia-Ukraine border. One company, Hawkeye 360, which flies small satellites that track and geolocate radio transmissions, documented a steady rise in ground-based GPS interference. Another company, Planet, flies a constellation of hundreds of breadbox-sized satellites that photograph the whole Earth once daily. Planet located Russian forces bivouacked just outside the disputed Donbas region.

On the very first day of the war, a radar satellite firm, Capella, detected Russian pontoon bridges on the Pripyat River. Capella’s satellites, which can see at night and through clouds that cover Ukraine 80 percent of the time during the winter, documented the movement of Russian forces into the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Satellite imagery has shown the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure as well as the digging of mass graves, evidence of Russian war crimes. Throughout, commercial satellite firms were helping Ukraine defend itself and make its case to the world.

Two weeks into the war, Ukraine elected to pursue formal relationships with commercial satellite providers. In a solemn written plea to eight of them, the vice prime minister of Ukraine asked for their cooperation in providing intelligence to the Ukrainian military. This may be the first such plea made in an active conflict. In formalizing its cooperation with the commercial satellite sector, Ukraine has erected a private-sector version of its own national geospatial agency.

In perhaps the most dramatic example of this sector’s potential, Ukraine now effectively owns its own satellite. Initially, a group of online crowdfunders set out to buy Turkish drones for Ukraine, but the drones were handed over free-of-charge. This provided a more than $16 million windfall to the government of Ukraine, which signed a contract with a Finnish company ICEYE. ICEYE, in turn, handed over exclusive use of one of its orbiting radar satellites to the Ukrainian armed forces.

What lessons can be learned from the role of commercial satellite firms in Ukraine? Few useful technologies remain affixed to their original purposes for long. Distinct systems become integrated systems of systems which, in turn, enable new and novel paradigms in geopolitics. Rockets alone do not make a space program; widespread access to overheard collection can make spacefarers out of the most unlikely of actors. Space-based intelligence is no longer a luxury but a necessity for sustaining our understanding of sovereignty in every part of the world.