Ukraine's most ambitious bet on communications sovereignty just survived a leadership crisis before a single operational satellite has flown. Dmytro Stetsenko, founder and CEO of Ukrainian satellite-terminal maker Stetman, died on June 13, 2026, of heart-related complications, according to Ukrainian MP Oleksandr Fediienko — news the company only confirmed on July 14 (TheDefender.media). His successor, Kateryna Diachenko, moved fast to reassure partners: she met with Jesper Stahl Hein, GomSpace's director of special defense projects, to confirm "business continuity and joint plans for the future." The project she inherited is UASAT — a planned 360-satellite low-Earth-orbit constellation, flying at roughly 550 km, that Stetman and Danish manufacturer GomSpace formalized as a joint venture on April 22, 2026 at the EU-Ukraine Business Summit in Brussels (PR Newswire / GomSpace-Stetman release). A test satellite is due to launch on a SpaceX vehicle in October 2026, with an initial 120-satellite operational phase targeted for 2027 and roughly 100-105 more satellites planned annually after that.
The steelman: dependency on one man's switch is a real vulnerability
The case for sovereign capacity is not paranoia. Reuters reported in July 2025 that Elon Musk ordered a Starlink shutdown affecting at least 100 terminals near Kherson during Ukraine's September 2022 counteroffensive, and that Ukrainian officials say the resulting communications blackout stalled an encirclement of Russian positions (Euromaidan Press, citing Reuters). SpaceX called the account "inaccurate" without specifying what was wrong, and Musk has separately said Starlink terminals will "never" be turned off — but the ambiguity itself is the point. Battlefield connectivity for drones, artillery spotting and command-and-control now runs through infrastructure owned by a single foreign company whose CEO has direct, undisclosed reach into whether it works. Poland alone pays roughly $50 million a year to fund half of Ukraine's roughly 42,000 Starlink terminals; Germany separately finances access to French operator Eutelsat; and in July 2025 Denmark became the first NATO ally to fund Ukrainian satellite terminals through the EU's European Defense Agency mechanism specifically to cut Starlink reliance (Kyiv Independent). Treating that concentration risk as a national-security problem worth paying to diversify is a defensible, proportionate call — the kind of redundancy any government would want for a utility this critical to its war effort.
Where the proportionality argument breaks down
The problem is that UASAT isn't shaping up as a hedge sized to the risk — it's shaping up as a from-scratch alternative to one of the most capital-intensive infrastructure categories in existence, undertaken by a company founded in 2023, mid-invasion, that has never operated a satellite. The scope has also moved fast: as recently as mid-2025, Stetsenko was describing a $634 million, 60-satellite LEO project built with help from Eutelsat and OneWeb (dev.ua). A year later, the disclosed plan is a >€1 billion, 360-satellite constellation with GomSpace as sole manufacturer and a domestic factory still to be built. A six-fold jump in both cost and satellite count within twelve months, on a project that hasn't launched its first unit, is the signature of a megaproject whose numbers are still being discovered rather than delivered against — and that was before its founder died with the roadmap barely off paper.
The EU is right to fund resilience. It should be funding a diversified bench of providers, not underwriting one company's leap from terminal reseller to constellation operator.
The European Commission's Ukraine Investment Framework is backing UASAT with roughly €140 million in guarantees and €21 million in grants, channeled through Ukraine's Ministry of Defense (Space Intelligence Report). That's public money underwriting execution risk on an unproven operator, in a sector where SpaceX's own Starlink took years and a mature commercial launch business to reach viability at far larger scale. Ukraine and its European backers already have a cheaper, faster diversification path in front of them — the Eutelsat, OneWeb and Denmark-funded-terminal arrangements that exist today and don't require building a satellite factory during wartime. UASAT can still be worth pursuing as a longer-horizon sovereign capability, particularly for government and military traffic that genuinely needs EW-resistant, non-Starlink-compatible terminals. But it should be funded and evaluated as one leg of a multi-vendor resilience strategy, not marketed as the answer to Starlink dependency while its cost estimates are still moving by hundreds of millions of euros a year and its leadership just changed hands unexpectedly.
The policy lesson generalizes beyond Ukraine: when a government moves to reduce reliance on a dominant foreign infrastructure provider, redundancy investment is sound risk management, but redundancy is best bought by diversifying suppliers, not by picking a single domestic champion and betting the war's connectivity on its execution. Diachenko's job now is to prove UASAT can hit 2027 on budget. Brussels' job is to keep funding alternatives in parallel in case it doesn't.