On May 31, 2026, Ukrainian Defense Ministry adviser Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov delivered a deliberately unalarming assessment: Russia's new low-Earth-orbit constellation, Rassvet ("Dawn"), now passes regularly over Ukraine, but shows no sign of military use yet. Built by the private aerospace firm Bureau 1440, Rassvet has only its first ~16 satellites in orbit — enough for a six-to-ten-minute data window once a day, nowhere near the 200–250 satellites Beskrestnov says are needed for stable, continuous service.
The honest version of his message was less about Russia's progress than Ukraine's exposure. "I have no idea who in our country is tracking this project," he said, adding that "there is no good way to counter Rassvet at this stage." The deeper problem is not the Russian satellites overhead. It is that Ukraine still runs its most critical battlefield and civilian connectivity through a single foreign vendor — and has no fallback.
The cutoff that revealed the dependency
That vulnerability was demonstrated, ironically, by a Ukrainian win. In early February 2026, SpaceX and Ukraine's Defense Ministry rolled out a Starlink "whitelist": only verified, registered terminals would keep working, and everything else — including the terminals Russian forces had captured and mounted on drones — would be cut off. Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers backed the move, with businesses verifying terminals through the Diia portal and the military using its secure DELTA channel (Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine).
It worked. According to Cloudflare data, Starlink traffic across Ukraine fell roughly 75% on February 4 and settled at 25–30% of prior levels, a collapse that mapped onto Russia's loss of the network (Militarnyi). Russian command-and-control on parts of the front "collapsed," as one Ukrainian official put it.
But the same episode cut both ways. A speed geofence and manual re-verification briefly knocked out legitimate Ukrainian users too — "the communications were down for two days until we figured out the white list procedure," one serviceman told Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera). The lesson generalizes: a network a single company can throttle, geofence, or re-permission overnight is a network whose terms you do not fully control. SpaceX used that power against Russia. The capability does not disappear when it is pointed in your favor.
Russia's answer is a state-owned constellation
Moscow's response is to build its own. Under Russia's "Internet Access Infrastructure" federal project, Bureau 1440 — part of the US-sanctioned ICS Holding — plans 156 Rassvet satellites in 2026, 292 by 2027 (the threshold for commercial service), and 318 by 2028, with talk of 900-plus by the mid-2030s (Militarnyi). The system promises up to 1 Gbps per terminal — and, crucially for Russia, terminals without the geographic restrictions SpaceX uses to limit strikes (Ukrinform).
Here is the strongest case for the sovereign-constellation approach, stated fairly: connectivity that an adversary's commercial provider can switch off is not connectivity a nation at war can rely on. Russia learned in February that depending on a hostile foreign network is a single point of failure, and a state-owned system removes that veto. The European Union reached a similar conclusion with its IRIS² program — a publicly backed multi-orbit constellation justified explicitly on sovereignty grounds. The instinct to control your own pipes is not irrational.
Diversify, don't nationalize
But the instinct points the wrong way for Ukraine — and for most democracies. Rassvet illustrates the cost of the sovereign route: it is the third year of a project that will not deliver stable service before 2027 at the earliest, and even its full build is a fraction of Starlink's 9,000-plus operational satellites. A from-scratch national constellation is slow, enormously capital-intensive, and obsolete on arrival against incumbents who launch faster than challengers can catch up. Ukraine cannot wait years for sovereignty it could approximate now.
The proportionate answer is redundancy through competition, not a state monopoly. Ukraine's exposure is not that Starlink exists; it is that there is no second vendor to fail over to. Commercial alternatives are arriving — Eutelsat-OneWeb is operational in LEO, Amazon's Kuiper is deploying, and the EU's IRIS² will offer allied capacity this decade. The policy work is unglamorous but decisive: contractual service guarantees and clear cutoff terms, terminals and ground systems that interoperate across providers, pre-negotiated allied access, and a designated owner inside government tracking exactly the scenarios Beskrestnov warns no one is watching.
This is the pro-innovation reading of a hard lesson. The commercial space race gave Ukraine connectivity no government program could have fielded in 2022, and it remains the fastest path to resilience. The fix for over-reliance on one private network is more private networks under enforceable terms — not a nationalized constellation that trades a foreign single point of failure for a domestic one. Rassvet passing overhead is not yet a military threat. It is a prompt: build the redundancy plan before the next cutoff, not after.