Ukraine's sovereign satellite venture just survived its first real test of institutional continuity — not a Russian strike, but the death of the man who founded it. Dmytro Stetsenko, CEO of Ukrainian satellite firm Stetman, died on June 13, 2026. Weeks later, his successor Kateryna Diachenko met Jesper Stahl Hein, GomSpace's director of special defense projects, in Brussels to reaffirm the joint venture the two companies had signed months earlier. The message was continuity: the $1.1 billion UASAT constellation is still happening.
From signing ceremony to succession test
GomSpace and Stetman signed the UASAT joint-venture agreement on April 22, 2026, at the EU-Ukraine Business Summit in Brussels, with senior officials from Ukraine's government, the European Investment Bank, and the European Commission's enlargement directorate in the room. Stetsenko called satellite communications "a critical enabler for both civilian society and national security"; GomSpace CEO Carsten Drachmann said sovereign access to space assets was now "a necessity" (SatNews). His death less than two months later made Diachenko's Brussels follow-up meeting a de facto proof-of-life for the project — evidence to skittish partners and financiers that a single founder's death would not unravel a program this large.
What's actually being built
UASAT is not a Starlink clone. It's designed as protected infrastructure for Ukraine's government, security services, and military, not a commercial broadband product. Ukraine filed for ITU registration of the first tranche — UASAT-NANO — in December 2025, and the network cleared its initial regulatory hurdle when it appeared in the ITU's BR IFIC Space publication on February 17, 2026. A single test satellite is due to launch in October 2026 to validate the technology; the first operational phase brings 120 satellites into a roughly 550-kilometer low-Earth orbit via SpaceX launches starting in 2027, feeding an eventual network of several hundred spacecraft and 30,000–50,000 ground terminals for Ukraine's armed forces (UNITED24 Media). Total cost — satellites, software, launches, broker fees, salaries — exceeds $1.13 billion (UNITED24 Media).
There's a reasonable case against spending that kind of money on an unproven venture mid-war. Ukraine's defense budget is stretched thin, Starlink already works, and channeling scarce capital into a decade-scale infrastructure bet — helmed, until recently, by a single founder — is a real diversification risk when every dollar could instead buy interceptors or artillery shells today. Critics of sovereign-infrastructure programs generally make a fair point: duplicating capability that already exists commercially is expensive, and dual-use guarantees can end up subsidizing ventures that a genuinely competitive private market would fund on its own merits, or not at all.
Why Kyiv is paying the premium anyway
That case is weaker than it sounds once you look at what happened the last time Ukraine's battlefield connectivity depended entirely on one foreign company's discretion. Reuters reported in July 2025 that Elon Musk ordered a SpaceX engineer to disable Starlink coverage near Beryslav, in Kherson Oblast, during Ukraine's autumn 2022 counteroffensive — a decision three sources linked to Musk's fear of provoking Russian nuclear escalation. A Ukrainian military source told Reuters the resulting blackout, which knocked out drone control and artillery coordination, contributed directly to the failed encirclement operation (Kyiv Independent). Musk and SpaceX have disputed the account, but the structural point stands regardless of who is right about that specific night: when your command-and-control layer is one commercial actor's product, your battlefield options are downstream of that actor's judgment, not your own. Russia's jamming complexes, which can destabilize Starlink connectivity across roughly 20 square kilometers per unit, compound the same problem from the other direction (UNITED24 Media). Sovereignty over the physical layer isn't paranoia here; it's a lesson already paid for in a failed counteroffensive.
The EU's role, and why it's the right kind of subsidy
What makes UASAT more than a vanity project is that Brussels is treating it as infrastructure, not charity. The European Commission's Ukraine Investment Framework — a €9.6 billion facility combining guarantees and blended finance, part of the broader €50 billion Ukraine Facility — explicitly lists "strategic investment and industries, incl. dual-use goods" as one of eight priority sectors, alongside digital transformation (European Commission). At the April summit where UASAT was signed, the Commission unveiled a €1.2 billion package that included €140 million in guarantees and €21 million in grants specifically for strategic and dual-use sectors, with potential to unlock €400 million in follow-on financing (European Commission). That's a narrower, better-targeted instrument than an open-ended subsidy: guarantees that de-risk private capital for a specific capability gap, rather than a blank check.
The real risk isn't the money
The honest vulnerability in UASAT isn't its price tag — it's execution risk. A constellation this size, built by a company that just lost its founder, still has to hit an October 2026 test launch, secure SpaceX launch slots through 2027, and stand up domestic manufacturing on schedule. Diachenko's Brussels meeting was necessary reassurance, not proof. But the underlying logic — that a wartime state shouldn't let its command-and-control layer depend entirely on one foreign billionaire's discretion — is sound, proportionate, and exactly the kind of resilience investment the EU's dual-use guarantees were built for.