Ukraine Military History Institute
Relying on one link is a choice, and Putiata calls it degradation
Dmytro Putiata opens with a complaint about his own side. Ukraine is capable of producing different types of communication systems, he says, and yet it keeps relying on one. Some people call that being technologically developed. In his opinion it is the opposite: investing money in self-degradation.
His evidence is a meeting he and Rob Lee had with a Ukrainian producer of ground robots. Putiata asked what communication the UGVs used. Satellite, came the answer. Would they consider a mesh network in the future? No, the producer said, it is not going to work.
Putiata says he was speechless. Russia is using UGVs on a mesh network, and all of their communication on those systems is built that way. If it works for Russia, he asks, why would it not work for Ukraine? He calls the answer ridiculous, and Samuel Cook puts it down to laziness.
The vulnerability is not only political
Rob Lee widens the point. The dependence is now a vulnerability, and it is so central to how Ukraine fights that losing it would matter enormously. The risk he names is not just Elon Musk. It is that Russia is building countermeasures, and those countermeasures are working in places.
Right now the focus is Crimea. Russia is prioritising Starlink jammers there, and Lee explains why: by Russia's own internal figures, about 90% of Ukraine's middle strike drones that hit Crimea carry Starlink. Russia is scaling production of these systems, and Lee says they have had some success. In some operations over Crimea, the drones using Starlink simply did not get through because the jamming was effective.
He adds a second data point with an honest caveat. Jamming along the front near the Sea of Azov about two weeks before the recording was a problem, and the system's range was greater than expected. He does not know the full extent of it, and he says so.
Every adversary is taking the same notes
Lee's larger concern is who else is watching. It is not only Russia learning to defeat Starlink. China is learning it too, and he expects Iran will as well. If the United States fights a peer or near-peer competitor, he says, that opponent will have some kind of counter-Starlink system, and the space domain will be a big part of the fight.
His warning is that nobody should assume Starlink will keep operating as well as it does for Ukraine today. It may be much harder. Adversaries will also build their own Starlink-like systems because they want the same advantage.
He applies the same logic to Ukrainian innovation in general. Every time Ukraine innovates, it teaches Russia the same thing. Operation Spider Web was very successful, but a week later Lee was wondering whether it had shown Russia how to do it. He points at the tarmacs where American B-52s are stored, out in the open, as a sign that the lesson has not been absorbed.
What a satellite link actually buys
The value is easiest to see in what it enables. Starlink lets operators in Kyiv go into warehouses every night and fly drones anywhere along the front. It lets UGV crews drive their vehicles from far behind the line, in comfort, rather than from somewhere underground near the fighting.
Lee then sketches where this could go. He would not be surprised if Russia started recruiting teenagers and young people with the best aptitude for video games and turning them into drone pilots at mass scale. They would not need military training. With the right satellite system, Putiata and Cook add, they could fly from Moscow, just as Ukraine flies from Kyiv.
Cheap enough to waste is the whole point
The argument then turns to economics. Ukraine's middle strike campaign is not all Starlink, Lee says, but Starlink plays a big role because it lets cheap drones operate at operational depth. He names the Dart, the Blyskavka and the Hornet, with the Blyskavka a fixed-wing FPV.
The figure he gives is the one that carries the argument: you can pilot one of these into a truck at 100-plus kilometres for less than $2,000. That is so cheap you do not need a target before launch. You fly it over the roads until something appears, and if nothing does, Lee says, you crash it into a tree. Who cares. A more expensive munition is never launched that way, because it is too valuable to send without a target already identified.
The effect goes beyond the trucks actually hit. A Hornet flying overhead suppresses movement: drivers stay off the roads more than they otherwise would. Russia has to change its air defence posture, commit resources, and run fuel trucks in convoys. Lee mentions footage from the day before the recording of a fuel convoy being destroyed.
The link stops where the hardest targets begin
Then comes the limit. Starlink is not enabled in Russian territory. So when Ukraine wants to hit something 200 to 300 kilometres into Russia, this cheap, target-optional model is not available.
That matters because of what sits there. Lee says the biggest threat is not ballistic missiles in general but ground-launched ballistic missiles. When a MiG-31 carrying the Kinzhal takes off, the air alarm sounds across the country. The same happens when Tu-95 bombers carrying the Kh-101 take off. Ground launchers give almost none of that warning. He lists the Iskander, the S-400, North Korea's KN-23 and KN-24, and also Tsirkon and Onyx.
These systems are hard to track and can operate in decentralised ways. The warning, Lee says, can be seconds before impact. In Kyiv over the previous two months, he notes, you often hear the first impact and only then the alarm.
What to watch
- Crimea strike success rates. If Russia's Starlink jamming there keeps scaling, a visible drop in middle strike results over the peninsula is the first place it would show.
- Mesh networking in Ukrainian UGVs. Putiata's complaint is falsifiable: either Ukrainian ground robot producers adopt mesh links the way Russia has, or the single-link dependence persists.
- Cheap strikes at 200 to 300 kilometres. Lee's gap is specific. Watch whether Ukraine finds a low-cost way to reach ground-launched ballistic missile launchers inside Russia without Starlink.