Fears of a Starlink shut-off at the front line have racked Ukraine. European satellite internet firms took the opportunity to step forward as replacements — but even collectively, they are unlikely to fill the void in coverage that Starlink's shut off would leave.
Today, Starlink satellite internet service dominates both worldwide and at Ukraine’s front lines. Moreover, Chinese rather than European competitors are building equivalent satellite constellations. If Ukraine is left waiting on an ally to provide an alternative to Starlink, Russia will likely get one from China first.
The U.S. paused weapons aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine last week, though that aid resumed after ceasefire talks in Jeddah. Ukrainians had feared Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and semi-official but eminently visible member of President Donald Trump’s team would cut Starlink access in Ukraine. Musk has tweeted, however, that he would “never do such a thing or use it as a bargaining chip.”
“Nobody knows right now if he’ll cut it off,” Colonel Pavlo Khazan of the General Directorate of Electronic and Cyber Warfare within the General Staff tells the Kyiv Independent. “But this would be a very serious problem.”
There are a handful of alternative satellite internet providers, but on the ground, Starlink still provides several hundred times more bandwidth than the nearest second — while also being much cheaper and easier to use. Starlink has proved remarkably resistant to Russian electronic interference.
“There would probably be some kind of catastrophe,” a head of intelligence for a unit near Pokrovsk told the Kyiv Independent, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons, “because right now, everyone is still on Starlinks.”
“There are no real alternatives,” a cybersecurity specialist with Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak publicly told the Kyiv Independent. “But I hardly think they’re going to turn it off. It would be bad for business.”
The character of Ukraine’s defense would fundamentally change without Starlink. The front would not necessarily collapse, but it would certainly go much darker.
The European replacements
European satellite internet firms are looking to fill in for Starlink at the same time that the European Union is broadly looking to take up the mantle of protection that Trump is keenly throwing away. But while they are eagerly presenting themselves as alternatives, they ultimately fall down on numbers.
Among major proposed alternatives are providers like Luxembourg’s SES and the French Eutelsat Group, which includes the British firm OneWeb.
Of all 10,000-plus man-made satellites in orbit around the earth, over two-thirds are Starlink’s. They are, moreover, the best of their kind. “No one had really built industrial-level laser comms terminals before at this massive scale, and so Starlink just did it,” says Blaine Curcio, a space and satcom consultant who publishes the China Space Monitor.
Starlink has been shut off on the Russian side of the line since the start of the war. That made Kursk the largest test bed for a Starlink-free Ukrainian military.
Reports have found OneWeb provided Ukrainian soldiers with satellite internet in Kursk Oblast during their seven-month occupation of the Russian region. Starlink’s nearest functional competitor, OneWeb has 648 satellites in orbit. OneWeb has not launched a new satellite since “completing its fleet” in March 2023. The fleet only has one satellite over Ukraine.
OneWeb’s satellites each provide a bandwidth of 7.2 gigabits per second, adding up to a network with a “cumulative usable capacity of 1.1 terabits per second.” Starlink’s current V2 satellites offer 96 Gbps, and SpaceX claims that its V3 satellite under development will hit 1 Tbps per unit. As of the end of 2024, Starlink’s total capacity was roughly 350 Tbps.
A Terabit is 125,000 megabytes. Streaming a high-definition movie requires around 10 megabytes per second, meaning only 12,500 people worldwide could watch a movie at the same time on OneWeb.
Curcio sees EutelStat’s claims of stepping up in Ukraine as a way of patching up a long-tarnished reputation.
“They have been beaten down pretty badly because everyone thinks it’s a complete cash sink,” said Curcio. “In addition to saying, ‘Hey, we care about the Ukrainians,’ they’re trying to show people that OneWeb is something that can actually work, because that’s been a big challenge for them.”
OneWeb has been around for almost as long as Starlink but has not had an illustrious track record. EutelSat Group, formed following a merger with OneWeb near the end of 2023, has seen its share price collapse in the intervening years. It went up over 600% following comments by Eva Berneke that they are “looking at” replacing Starlink in Ukraine.
Starlink currently boasts 5 million users globally and over 42,000 terminals in Ukraine. Representatives for OneWeb declined to comment on their ability to replicate that scale but wrote in a statement to the Kyiv Independent that “OneWeb solutions can provide an alternative for certain government and defense applications.”
OneWeb representatives would also not answer as to where to buy its terminals in Ukraine. On outside markets, they run upwards of $10,000. New Starlinks, for comparison, sell on Ukrainian online electronics stores for just over $400, compared to roughly $549 on U.S. Amazon.
The numbers for other would-be EU competitors to Starlink are even grimmer. SES has a total of 70 satellites. Canadian firm Telesat is currently trying to get 198 satellites into orbit. They face remarkably slow launch times.
These EU telecoms are unlikely to be able to expand coverage rapidly to cover Ukraine in the near term. “It's not feasible because there's not enough spare satellites,” says Curcio.
“There are other constellations in development that will be bigger in terms of mass, but OneWeb is the one that has actually achieved its fleet,” says Juliana Suess, an associate at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, “whereas Project Kuiper, IRIS², etc., they haven't got satellites up yet. So they're not really an alternative for now.”
The California-based Astranis is one firm that Curcio points to as more likely to be able to send a handful of satellites to Ukraine in the near future, largely because they do launches for relatively high-risk customers like the Peruvian satellite communications company Andesat, some of whom go broke and can no longer pay for Astranis’ service.
Another military comms service called TooWay is a joint project between EutelSat and Viasat dating back to 2007 that Ukraine was already using before Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“With TooWay, the speed of transfer of this data and internet connection is very small. That is, you’ll end up downloading one video for half a day,” Volodymyr “Tekhnar,” a battalion commander for the 28th Mechanized Brigade who declined to provide his last name for security reasons, told the Kyiv Independent.
Russia hacked and brought down Tooway an hour before attacking on Feb. 24, 2022, ultimately pushing Ukraine’s Armed Forces onto Starlink in the first place. Despite being a consumer technology, Starlink has also remained remarkably resistant to Russian electronic warfare.
As a result, Ukraine today remains “quite” dependent on Starlink, said Suess.
In the absence of Starlink, alternatives would, in effect, take Ukraine’s front-line forces back in time from broadband to dial-up internet.
The Russian compensation
It’s not likely to destroy the Ukrainian line overnight. But Ukrainian soldiers would shortly face communications issues similar to those of their Russian counterparts, shrouding them in a thicker fog of war.
“We are prepared for the event that the Starlink network goes down. We may not have super speeds, but let's just say that we will be able to watch online as time goes on,” said Tekhnar.
Starlink has been geofenced to skirt the Russian line since before the outset of the full-scale war. Russian acquisition of limited access hastened advances like that on Vuhledar this past fall. Conversely, the Ukrainian advance near the end of 2022 slowed as Ukrainian forces pushed forward faster than Starlink was restoring coverage to areas previously blocked as being under Russian occupation.
Much of the souring of the relationship between Ukraine and Musk began with Musk refusing a Ukrainian request to turn on Starlink to allow a military operation in Crimea.
Ukraine on its own has a handful of satellites in orbit, mostly of a tiny experimental variety. As of the end of 2024, Russian state-owned space firm RosKosmos tallied 288 satellites in orbit. Suess noted that most Russian satellites “don’t look like they're suitable for tactical communications.”
“Some of the communication satellites that Russia has that were used by the intelligence service, for example, were purely mailbox satellites,” she explained. “So you send up a signal or a message, and then you have to wait for that satellite to just come back around to the ground station in however many hours.”
Like Russia, Ukraine without Starlink will have to depend more on data streams that are narrower and more vulnerable to interference, including frequency bands of cell service reserved for military and greater reliance on on-the-ground radio comms like walkie talkies, as well as civilian cell towers that often behave erratically at the front.
Streaming and sharing high-resolution footage of drone attacks would become a largely untenable luxury.
The Chinese future
Further into the future, however, the most likely alternative to Starlink for both Russia and Ukraine is not European but Chinese.
The first alternative to Starlink that came to mind for Colonel Khazan was G60 Starlink, also known as the Thousand Sails, a network of satellites from the Chinese company SpaceSail.
“The most relevant company by far is SpaceSail,” agreed Curcio. “In the last year and a bit, they've now launched 72 satellites, and I guess more importantly, they've entered a handful of forward markets in different ways.”
After years of Chinese state projects falling short of launch goals, the government gave “the green flag for somewhat private investment” into the telecom industry at the end of 2023, Curcio said. SpaceSail was the primary beneficiary. The firm is, however, barred from providing services within China and has a strictly international aim.
“Give them 18 months and SpaceSail will probably be able to get a couple tens of gigabits per second, maybe, of capacity over that general part of the world at any given time — maybe more. Maybe a hundred,” said Curcio of Ukraine.
This is, however, not likely to benefit Ukraine in the long term. Ukrainian government agencies have in recent years purged Chinese telecoms equipment like Huawei from their networks since the start of the war.
Chinese companies routinely provide Russia with high-tech services and equipment that the U.S. and EU ban. In January, SpaceSail set up a subsidiary in Kazakhstan, a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States and a long-time eager intermediary for Russian sanctions evasion.
SpaceSail’s ongoing launches are consequently more likely to give Russian soldiers in Ukraine internet services that Ukrainian soldiers have long enjoyed than they are to help Ukraine move beyond Starlink.
Francis Farrell contributed reporting to this article.
Asami Terajima
