Ukraine is putting a price tag on space sovereignty: more than $1.1 billion for a state-directed constellation of 360 satellites, built to give its military and government a communications backbone that no foreign company can throttle, reprice, or switch off. The project, led by Ukrainian startup Stetman through a joint venture called UASAT with Denmark's GomSpace, will launch its first 120 satellites with SpaceX starting in 2027, reaching full deployment by 2030 (Militarnyi).
The case for going sovereign is real
Start with the strongest version of the argument for this, because it is a good one. Starlink has been indispensable to Ukraine's war effort — but a privately controlled network is also a single point of failure that no sovereign government should accept for its command-and-control architecture. Ukrainian forces lost Starlink connectivity during the 2022 maritime drone raid on Sevastopol and again during the 2024 incursion into Russia's Kursk region, and in February 2025 Kyiv had to reckon with reports that Starlink access could become a bargaining chip in rare-earth-minerals negotiations with Washington (Jamestown Foundation). A state whose battlefield coordination depends on the commercial and political judgment of one foreign CEO has outsourced a piece of its sovereignty it cannot get back on demand. That is not a hypothetical risk in this war — it has already happened.
Ukraine's Ministry of Defense drew the obvious conclusion. In March 2025 it stood up a Space Policy Directorate under Deputy Defense Minister Kateryna Chernohorenko, explicitly to make the ministry "the central customer of space technology" and to deliver national defense satellites by 2030 (UNITED24 Media). UASAT is the clearest expression of that mandate to date: a 550-kilometer low-Earth-orbit network built for electronic-warfare resistance, serving state and military users first, with allied access planned later — not a commercial Starlink competitor.
But diversification isn't the same as sovereignty
Here is where the policy needs more scrutiny than the headline number gets it. UASAT reduces Ukraine's exposure to Starlink specifically — but SpaceX is still the confirmed launch provider for the constellation's foundational first phase, chosen, according to reporting, for its lower cost and reliability over rivals. Trading dependence on one Musk-controlled service for dependence on another Musk-controlled service is diversification of a product, not of a supply chain. If the policy goal is genuinely to insulate Ukraine's command-and-control from any single company's decisions, the launch-provider question deserves the same scrutiny as the satellite-operator question — and right now no alternative has been named for the 240 satellites beyond the first 120.
The financing gap is the bigger near-term problem. Stetman's own reporting acknowledges the $1.1 billion budget remains largely unsecured, dependent on multiple future private capital rounds, and the company's founder, Dmytro Stetsenko, died on June 13, 2026, mid-project, with leadership passing to new CEO Kateryna Diachenko (UNITED24 Media). That is a serious execution risk to layer onto a program meant to underpin national defense communications, in a wartime economy already running on more than €90 billion in EU support loans for defense capability and state functioning (European Commission). A sovereign satellite network that exists mostly on a term sheet is not yet sovereignty — it's an option on sovereignty, and options can lapse.
The right template, if Kyiv is honest about the risk
What makes UASAT defensible policy, rather than prestige spending, is its scope and its integration with allies rather than isolation from them. It targets government and military traffic specifically, doesn't ban or nationalize commercial Starlink terminals that still serve most of the front line, and sits alongside — not instead of — Ukraine's deepening space relationship with the EU, including its April 2025 access to Copernicus and space-weather monitoring, and negotiations authorized in March 2026 for future access to the EU's own GOVSATCOM and IRIS² secure-connectivity constellations (European Commission). The Stetman-GomSpace joint venture itself was formalized at the April 2026 EU-Ukraine Business Summit in Brussels, alongside a €161 million EU declaration meant to unlock up to €400 million in emerging defense-technology investment (Kyiv Independent). That is diversification through allied capital and market competition, not autarky — the model other exposed states should study.
The lesson for other governments watching Ukraine's wartime experience is not "build your own satellites." Most states will never need to, and few could finance it. The lesson is narrower and more useful: audit which single commercial dependencies sit inside your critical command infrastructure, price the political risk honestly, and diversify through competitive procurement and allied co-investment rather than either blind reliance or a costly dash for full self-sufficiency. Ukraine is doing the first two well. Whether it can finance the third by 2030 is still an open question — and one worth watching rather than assuming answered.