Before the Kremlin’s troops and tanks began crashing into Russia’s borders, before its missiles began setting Ukrainian cities and cathedrals ablaze, its leaders introduced a clandestine project that they believed would help achieve a quick victory in a blitzkrieg.
Russia’s infamous military intelligence directorate introduced a cyber ambush that went almost perfectly: it hit stations on a U. S. satellite network that Ukraine’s president and defense chiefs relied on to talk to others and command their soldiers.
The sneak attack temporarily destroyed tens of thousands of Viasat modems, jeopardizing the important ties that bind Kyiv to its defenders across the country and its allies around the world.
Isolating Ukraine’s most sensible commanders with a virtual iron curtain while Russian tanks aimed to capture the capital, with a barrage of rockets aimed at television and telecommunications towers, was part of a grand project to suffocate the beleaguered guardians of democracy in “the fog of war. “”, according to Victoria Samson, lead director of security and stability for the area at the Washington-based think tank Secure World Foundation.
The central detail of this project to destroy Kyiv’s ties to the U. S. constellation that provided the president and his security council with a web policy and the ability to coordinate Ukrainian resistance, said Samson, one of the most sensible space defense experts in the United States. me in an interview. .
The Russian military’s willingness to temporarily hamper Kyiv’s ability to exploit complex area technologies, he said, was recently highlighted in a column compiled through his colleagues at the Naval Analysis Center.
These CNA researchers, after reviewing treaties and orders issued within the scope of the Russian military, reported that “controlling access to the area’s data is conferring enormous merit in terms of. . . greater war capacity. “
Russian defense strategists also claim that it is imperative to destroy the enemy’s space infrastructure “during the initial era of war, when either side is most likely to conduct, in Russian parlance, an ‘information attack’ to disable the adversary’s command. “. , control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance,” CNA experts charge in their report “The role of space in Russian operations in Ukraine”.
The paramount importance that Kremlin generals attach to the annihilation of technologies from an adversary’s area in the early stages of a confrontation explains Russia’s tightly synchronized invasions of the Viasat network and Ukrainian territory, neither of which is heavily protected.
“Russian forces intentionally targeted Viasat terminals in an effort to disrupt Ukrainian military communications as they invaded Ukraine,” Samson told me. “Russia has never officially admitted that it was the attacks, however, the United States and its EU partners officially declared it in May 2022. The British Foreign Secretary, after tasking “Russian army intelligence” with organizing the cyber blitzkrieg, promised that it would suffer “serious repercussions”.
Back in Moscow, the Kremlin’s celebrations aimed at trapping Kyiv’s leaders in a black hole of data, even as their armored battle group slipped toward the capital, were abandoned.
Russian infantrymen cordoned off Moscow’s Red Square to celebrate a war victory in Array. [ ] Ukraine (Photo via ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP Getty Images)
In an operation similar to the Berlin Airlift, organized to save some other democratic enclave surrounded by the Kremlin’s surprise troops, SpaceX founder Elon Musk began sending tens of thousands of Starlink stations to Ukraine, connecting the country to the World Wide Web through its broadband satellites. Around the world.
Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs, creators of state-of-the-art imaging satellites, have begun flooding Ukraine’s presidential palace and the world’s major newsrooms with high-resolution panoramic photographs, taken from the area, of the stranded Russian tank line on the outskirts of Kyiv, mass. Graves that began to appear in Russian-occupied villages and in cities bombed by Moscow’s missiles.
When the Russians invaded Ukraine, they attacked places of worship, such as St. Andrew’s Church. . . . [ ] Andrew is shown in this symbol captured through Maxar’s orbital cameras. Satellite image (c) 2022 Maxar Technologies.
The Russians furious.
Vladimir Putin has begun sending his envoys to U. N. meetings to threaten his local forces with shooting down U. S. satellites helping Ukraine.
But then the desperate nature of that purpose is transparent to Russian leaders, Samson says.
Whereas the Soviet Union once competed with its arch-enemy the United States to put complicated missile-tracking satellites into orbit, Putin’s Russia (where a great deal of official corruption stretches from the Kremlin to its cosmodromes) now has fewer than two hundred satellites (compared to more than 6,000 introduced). only through SpaceX.
At the same time, Russia lags markedly behind the United States and other NATO countries, and even Ukraine, when it comes to integrating area generation into its military operations, says James Clay Moltz, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
Putin’s strategists “were not prepared for a prolonged confrontation against an adversary who had more aerial data than they did,” Professor Moltz told me in an interview. “The Russian military still faces a data deficit, due to the limitations of its constellations and its lack of attachment to the Western advertising imaginary. “
Despite the success of the attack on the Viasat terminals, he said, Russia has not achieved its main goal: to deny the Ukrainian military space-based information.
“Russia obviously did not foresee the cooperation that Ukraine would get from Western countries and from advertising services,” says Professor Moltz, referring to a series of fascinating books about the festival among major space powers around the world, adding “Asia’s Space Race” and “Space Security Policy. “
While issuing a series of threats aimed at attacking Western satellites coming to Ukraine’s aid (which would most likely target SpaceX, Planet, and Maxar), Putin’s inner circle of defense chiefs likely concluded that “destroying one or two Western satellites with the ASAT weapon he tested in November 2021” would do virtually nothing to counter Russia’s lag in states’ space power United.
Instead of aiming its missiles at SpaceX spacecraft, Moscow introduced them to Starlink stations scattered throughout Ukraine and in Dnipro, the space center long called Ukraine’s “Rocket City. “
Hit by heavy shelling, survivors of the “rocket city” of Dnipro in Ukraine celebrate Easter in the Array. [ ] Cathedral of the Transfiguration of the Savior (Photo by Arsen Dzodzaiev/Global Images Ukraine Getty Images)
Professor Moltz says the Dnieper has been hit by Russian rockets in the past two years, and that the mechanisms of its Yuzhmash spacecraft have been attacked by a series of strikes.
David Burbach, a professor at the Naval War College, says in a prescient article titled “The First Lessons of the Russo-Ukrainian War as a Space Conflict”: “The Russo-Ukrainian War would possibly be the first bilateral regional war. “in the history of humanity.
Professor Moltz agrees: “Yes, this is the first bilateral space war and Ukraine is at the forefront thanks to its partners. “
This First Space War, he predicted, could be just a precursor to technologically complicated long-term space confrontations between superpowers.
If primary missile battles break out in those projected celestial conflicts, he adds, low-Earth orbit may simply prove uninhabitable for human explorers.
However, this is precisely the long term envisaged by some of Russia’s most sensible regional commissioners.
CNA specialists cite Colonel General V. B. Zarudnitsky, who heads the Russian Army General Staff Academy, predicts that in the near future we will see “a new war bureaucracy in the form of especially anti-satellite combat, systemic army operations aimed at destroying state infrastructure. “-operations.
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