Russia is answering its dependence on Starlink on two clocks at once. The Volna Kupol Garant jammer works here and now, but it turns itself into a priority target: a powerful emission and a bulky rig give the complex away and leave it exposed to detection and strikes. Rassvet is a real low-orbit constellation, but a civilian commercial one whose full deployment is promised only by 2030. Neither answer closes the gap on the timescale of the war.
As of 18 July 2026. This is a live story: some parameters come from the Ukrainian side and from named analysts, and are only partly confirmed independently.
The big picture
Over the past year Starlink has stopped being merely a communications link for Ukraine's army and become the load-bearing structure of a whole class of operations. "Mid-strike" attack drones — which hit targets dozens of kilometres behind the line, from fuel depots and warehouses to air-defence nodes and command posts — are flown in real time over SpaceX's satellite channel. That channel was long considered all but un-jammable, and it underpins the deep-strike campaign that, as FACTUM's June review argued, has reshaped the logic of the war.
Hence Russia's task: to break that dependence. Moscow has two answers, and they are easy to conflate even though they belong to different categories and different time horizons. The first is tactical — ground-based electronic-warfare complexes that suppress the Starlink signal locally. The second is strategic — its own low-orbit constellation, Rassvet, routinely billed as a "Russian Starlink".
The argument here is straightforward: both answers are real, but neither solves the underlying problem on the timescale the war is being fought. The jammer works within a radius of a few kilometres, yet remains exposed to detection and destruction. The constellation is a civilian commercial system with a commercial launch set for 2027 and full coverage by 2030; its civilian origin does not rule out later military use, but within this war's horizon it is no front-line replacement for Starlink. The gap between the dependence and its replacement stays open.
How the jamming works: the Volna Kupol Garant
The complex in question is what the Ukrainian side calls the Volna Kupol Garant. According to Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine's defence ministry and an OSINT analyst, in an account relayed by Reuters, it is made by the Simferopol firm Rossiysky Kupol, and a single complex is put at roughly $1.5m. All of these are one belligerent's figures; they are not independently confirmed, and Reuters expressly notes that it could not verify Russia's tactics.
Technically the design is unusual. By Beskrestnov's account, it comprises six trailers carrying twelve antennas that radiate interference in the same band as Starlink's user uplink — 14–14.5 GHz — targeting several satellite channels at once. The key point: the interference is directed towards the satellite in the user-uplink band, hampering the satellite's reception of signals from ground terminals within the affected area rather than disabling the spacecraft itself. The declared suppression zone is about 20 sq km.
The history explains why this has surfaced now. Beskrestnov says the first case of Russian Starlink jamming was recorded back in 2024 on the Kharkiv axis; Ukrainian forces quickly found and destroyed that complex, and there were no mass attempts until 2026. Jamming against Starlink returned once Ukraine's campaign against rear-area logistics gathered pace — that is, it is a direct response to the threat to logistics rather than a stand-alone initiative.
Does it work — and at what cost
Locally, the jamming works. Rob Lee of the US-based Foreign Policy Research Institute — a top-tier source — assesses that Russia is making gradual progress against Ukrainian drones, and that if it can scale up production of the jammers, running the mid-strike campaign will get harder. It is a cautious formulation, and all its force sits in the condition "if it can scale".
So far that condition is unmet, and the reason lies in the physics of the complex itself. A powerful emitter generates its own tell-tale signature: by Ukrainian specialists' account, such complexes are picked up by electronic-reconnaissance assets, and a bulky, multi-component rig becomes a priority target once located. By the Ukrainian side's count, around ten such systems have been identified, and at least two destroyed — one in a joint operation with the SBU, hours after being detected. A crew commander in the 422nd Unmanned Systems Regiment (call sign "Dyryhent") told Reuters that after a strike on one installation, Starlink-guided drones "flew without problems". In other words, the suppression lifts along with the complex itself.
The context turns the familiar picture on its head. Until late January 2026, Russian troops were themselves using illegally imported Starlink terminals — including on strike drones — to bypass Ukrainian jamming of GPS and radio. After Kyiv's appeal, SpaceX shut off the unauthorised Russian terminals; Beskrestnov described the result as a "catastrophe" for Russian command and control. At the same time, Russia lost much of the advantage that unauthorised Starlink access had given it. The same system thus ended up both a lost Russian asset and a target for Russian electronic warfare. There is a technical irony, too: a 20-km "dome" of interference degrades any Starlink inside it, no matter whose.
Russia's own Starlink: what Rassvet is, and what it cannot replace
In parallel, Moscow is deploying its own low-orbit constellation, Rassvet — a project of Bureau 1440 (part of IKS Holding) that is billed as a "Russian Starlink". It is funded under the "Data Economy" national project; according to Kommersant, the figure is 102.8bn roubles from the federal budget and 329bn roubles of extra-budgetary funds, while an earlier total estimate to 2030 (The Bell) put the project at about 445bn roubles.
The chronology shows the real scale. After the experimental Rassvet-1 (2023) and Rassvet-2 (2024) missions, the first 16 serial satellites were placed in orbit on 23 March 2026 by a Soyuz-2.1b from Plesetsk; the company soon lost one of them. A commercial service launch is planned for 2027, and the target constellation of 292 satellites (out of a total plan of about 383) for 2030; stable global coverage requires more than 250.
Reality check. According to RBC, Starlink had more than 9,800 working satellites at the end of February 2026. In orbit now there are roughly fifteen Rassvet craft against nearly ten thousand operational Starlink satellites. That is a gap not in tempo but of almost three orders of magnitude in the number of active craft in the constellations being compared.
The road to those figures has been bumpy. The first batch's launch was pushed back from late 2025 for want of assembled craft (The Moscow Times, citing Kommersant). Separately, Roscosmos is folding two previously stand-alone projects — the broadband Skif and Marathon IoT — into a new, smaller constellation, which again speaks to plans being reassembled rather than moving into serial production.
Behind the timelines sits a structural constraint. A modern satellite constellation is, above all, an advanced electronic-component base — and this is precisely where Russia, under sanctions, is critically dependent on imports. According to Bloomberg (May 2026), Russia now sources up to 90% of sanctioned technologies via China, up from 80% a year earlier; a 2023 Kyiv School of Economics estimate put China at about 90% of all microelectronics Russia imports. There are no open-source data on Bureau 1440's supply chain, and the statistic cannot be mapped onto a single project directly — but the very slippage of the first serial launch "for want of assembled craft" points to production, not just orbital, constraints. Catching Starlink at scale while depending on an external component supplier is an inherently slower task than launching individual batches of satellites.
What gets lost behind the "Starlink analogue" label is a question of timing and scale, not only of purpose. Rassvet is being built first and foremost as a civilian commercial broadband system (inter-satellite laser links, terminals on 5G NTN technology, with announced use cases such as Wi-Fi on Sapsan and Lastochka trains and connectivity in the Arctic), rather than as a declared, purpose-built military network. That in itself does not preclude future dual use: Starlink is precisely an example of civilian commercial infrastructure that became critical to the military. But that is exactly why the argument is not about "civilian origin": there are physically too few satellites in orbit, no commercial service is running, the terminal ecosystem is not scaled, and the timelines for full deployment run well beyond the operational horizon of the current war.
The other side's logic and cost
Russia's task is, in itself, militarily rational. Mid-strikes hit fuel, air defence and command, materially complicating supply and, among other things, deepening the fuel shortage in occupied Crimea — a dynamic FACTUM has examined in its analysis of how long Russia's petrol will last under the current refinery strikes. The same pressure on the peninsula's logistics has wrecked Crimea's tourist season. Defending the rear against such a threat is a legitimate military aim, and jamming the drones' control channel is an obvious move for the defending side.
Symmetry requires naming the Ukrainian side's vulnerability, too. Reliance on a single foreign commercial provider is a structural risk: decisions rest with a private company, and there are precedents for SpaceX restrictions in 2022–2023. The dependence Russia is trying to sever by jamming remains a weak point for Kyiv regardless of whether any given jammer works.
Finally, the spectrum is a shared battlefield. Ukraine jams Russian drones on GPS and radio; Russia got around that via Starlink and tethered fibre-optic drones; now it is the turn of jamming the satellite channel. This is not "one side's weapon" but another turn of mutual adaptation, in which each answer breeds a counter — and another target.
What could disprove this assessment
The conclusion that Russian jamming is self-limiting stops holding under several conditions.
Russia scales output faster than Ukraine destroys the complexes. This is exactly Lee's condition. If jammers number in the dozens and push deep along the front, the mid-strike campaign will slow, even with individual losses.
SpaceX does not harden the network. If no countermeasures follow — interference nulling, agile beam-steering — local suppression will prove more durable than it is now.
Ukraine's alternatives cannot stretch the range. Fibre is limited by cable length; radio-relay and multi-drone schemes carry their own trade-offs; under mass jamming they may not suffice.
An accelerated or military Rassvet variant appears. This looks unlikely on current timelines, but a sharp acceleration of deployment or a military layer over the civilian constellation would change the strategic part of the conclusion.
The reverse scenario is also possible: SpaceX's technical countermeasures — from changing the network's operating parameters to greater jam-resistance and adaptive beam management — could potentially reduce the effectiveness of the costly ground complexes; then even scaling them up would yield less.
Conclusions
What is established. Russia has deployed Starlink-jamming electronic-warfare complexes at the front; by the Ukrainian side's count there are around ten, and at least two have been destroyed. Local suppression is real, but the complexes give themselves away and are vulnerable to strikes. Separately, it is established that Rassvet is a civilian commercial broadband constellation with roughly fifteen satellites in orbit, a commercial launch in 2027 and a target configuration by 2030 — almost three orders of magnitude behind the operational Starlink by satellite count.
What remains hypothesis. Whether jamming can genuinely blunt the mid-strike campaign is open, and turns on the race between scaling the complexes and the speed of their destruction. Whether the Russian constellation acquires military or dual use over time is likewise open: civilian origin neither rules it out nor brings it closer within this war's horizon.
If current trends hold, the likeliest trajectory is neither a "breakthrough" nor a "collapse" but a grinding contest in the spectrum, in which Russia buys local pauses at the price of expensive, vulnerable complexes — and closes its structural dependence on Starlink neither with the jammer nor with Rassvet, whose deployment runs up against a sanctions-driven reliance on imported, largely Chinese, components, within the span of this war.
Sources
Reuters, France24, Meduza (English), Euromaidan Press, Kyiv Post and CNN on the jamming and the mid-strike campaign; the Ukrainian side's assessments are attributed to defence-ministry adviser S. Beskrestnov and to commanders of the 422nd Regiment, with independent calibration from R. Lee (FPRI). On Rassvet and the state programmes: Kommersant, Vedomosti, RBC, The Bell, The Moscow Times, RFE/RL and Bureau 1440 materials. On Russia's reliance on imported, largely Chinese, components: Bloomberg and the Kyiv School of Economics. Some technical parameters of the jammer and operational details are one belligerent's data, not independently confirmed; estimates of the cost and timelines of the Russian constellation may vary between sources.