The Deal
On April 22, 2026, at the EU-Ukraine Business Summit in Brussels, Ukrainian satellite-communications firm Stetman and Danish manufacturer GomSpace signed the agreement establishing UASAT, a joint venture to build a sovereign, dual-use satellite network for Ukraine's government and armed forces. The plan: 360 satellites in low Earth orbit at roughly 550 kilometers, launched in stages, with the first 120 flying on SpaceX rockets starting in 2027 and full deployment targeted for 2030. Total cost — satellites, ground software, launches, and maintenance — is estimated at $1.13 billion. A single test satellite, UASAT-NANO, is due to launch in October 2026 to validate the design before the larger batch commits.
The European Commission is putting real money behind it: 140 million euros in guarantees plus 21 million euros in grants — roughly 161 million euros combined — channeled through the EU's Ukraine Investment Framework and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. That's a meaningful public backstop, but a minority share of the total: the rest is expected from private capital, raised in stages as GomSpace and Stetman hit milestones.
Why Redundancy, Now
The trigger is battlefield, not political. Russian forces have deployed an electronic-warfare system Ukrainian communications expert Serhii Beskrestnov calls "Volna Kupol Garant" — trailer-mounted jammers that flood roughly 20 square kilometers with interference aimed at severing Starlink links near the front. Each unit costs Russia an estimated $1.5 million to build. Ukraine's forces have destroyed several by drone strike since June 2026, but the systems keep reappearing, and frontline units report intermittent Starlink outages in contested sectors as a result.
That matters because Starlink is not a marginal tool for Ukraine — more than 50,000 terminals are deployed across the military and civilian infrastructure, carrying artillery coordination, drone control, and hospital connectivity alike. A single commercial constellation, run by a company whose owner has previously made unilateral calls about where the network would and wouldn't work — SpaceX restricted Starlink coverage near Crimea in 2022 to head off a Ukrainian drone strike — is a strategic dependency any government would want to hedge, jamming aside.
The Case for State-Directed Backup Capacity
It's worth stating the strongest version of the argument for what Kyiv is doing here, because it's a good one. Militaries have never wanted mission-critical command-and-control infrastructure to sit entirely inside a foreign company's commercial and political discretion — that's true regardless of how well-disposed the company is today, because incentives and ownership can change, and a state at war cannot afford to find that out the hard way. Redundant, government-controlled capacity is a legitimate hedge against both physical disruption and the softer risk of a single company's business decisions. On that logic, the EU backing this with guarantees isn't corporate welfare; it's underwriting a public good — sovereign command infrastructure — that private markets alone won't produce at wartime speed, because the payoff (resilience in an unlikely but catastrophic scenario) doesn't show up on GomSpace's balance sheet.
Why the Structure Still Deserves Credit
Where this earns a pro-market endorsement rather than skepticism is in how it's built. Kyiv isn't nationalizing satellite communications, mandating EU-only procurement, or banning Starlink terminals — the 50,000 already deployed keep running. UASAT is a commercial joint venture between a Ukrainian firm and a Danish manufacturer, financed mostly by private capital, with the EU's role limited to guarantees and grants that de-risk roughly a seventh of the total cost rather than fund the whole project outright. Even more tellingly, the first 120 satellites are launching on SpaceX rockets — the same company whose consumer product this venture is meant to reduce dependency on. That's proportionate: Kyiv is adding a second, harder-to-jam layer of redundancy, not trying to replace a functioning commercial market with a state monopoly.
A heavier-handed industrial-policy version of this — an EU mandate that all Ukrainian military communications migrate to European-built systems on a fixed deadline — would have been slower, costlier, and would have discarded Starlink's proven wartime performance for the sake of sovereignty as an end in itself. This version doesn't do that.
Execution Is the Real Risk
The open question isn't the policy logic, which holds up — it's delivery. Founder Dmytro Stetsenko died on June 13, 2026, weeks after the joint venture was signed, and the project now runs under new Stetman leadership, with Kateryna Diachenko meeting GomSpace executives to reaffirm the partnership. Only the first 120 of 360 satellites have a firm SpaceX launch arrangement; the remaining 240 don't yet. And EU funding is explicitly conditional on financing staying on schedule — a project already stretching to 2030 has plenty of room to slip.
None of that undercuts the case for redundancy. It does mean the $1.13 billion figure is a target, not a delivered capability, and Ukraine will need Starlink at full strength for years regardless of how UASAT proceeds. Proportionate hedging beats both complacent dependency and reflexive protectionism — but only if it actually gets built.