In brief: Ukraine may be adopting Israeli-Italian HiSKY satellite links for deep-strike drones, trading Starlink’s capacity in exchange for greater resistance to jamming and US interference. Use remains unconfirmed, but recent refinery strikes suggest improved accuracy and effectiveness.
Ukraine’s long-range drone forces are shifting away from higher capacity but politically unreliable satellite communications delivered by Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite network to data links using Israeli-Italian technology that is a lot less capable but impossible for the White House to shut off, Russian and Ukrainian news reports said on Sunday.
Claims first appearing in late October in Russian military media said the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) had started installing aboard drones targeting oil refineries and military infrastructure deep inside Russia terminals that access the HiSKY SmartLight satellite communications system, an alternative to the US-manufactured Starlink or Starshield receivers that had been in near-universal AFU use since 2022.
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Russian military analyst Konstantin Malofeev in an Oct. 30 report said that a HiSKY-equipped drone operating over Russia is unjammable because the system automatically hops from commercial satellite to commercial satellite if the signal degrades. The Ukrainian shift away from SpaceX’s Starlink system was driven by a Musk decision to block Ukrainian use of Starlink coverage over Russia “because otherwise Russia would shoot down Musk’s satellites,” he said.
The shift to HiSKY helped Ukrainian drone operators make unimpeded swarm attacks against Russian oil refineries and to pilot multiple aircraft to single out and hit vulnerable locations of the plants, Malofeev said.
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The Russia-associated Coordination Center for the Assistance of New Russia (CCANR), in an Oct. 29 analytical video published on RuTube, said that authorities had obtained “confirmed information” that Ukraine’s drone forces had begun using HiSKY technology in attacks on Russia:
“This is not Starlink. This is European equipment that allows, using European communications networks, the piloting of long-range drones and other devices, like crewless boats, against the entire territory of the Russian Federation,” said CCANR Director Aleksandr Liubimov. “There are no limitations to the capacities of this equipment like there are on Starlink, which doesn’t work in Russia.”
“According to our information [the Ukrainians] are testing this technology in border regions of Russia with the objective of using it more widely,” Liubimov said. “We [Russia] can expect mass use of drones [equipped with HiSKY terminals] against any point in the Russian Federation using this space communications system, specifically that does not belong to [SpaceX CEO Elon] Musk, but to Europe.”
HiSKY, according to corporate-published information, is an Israeli company with a British subsidiary, hiSkySat Ltd., operating an R&D center at Harwell in Oxfordshire. The UK Space Agency is funding the project with £9 million ($12 million) allocated through the European Space Agency (ESA), a UK government statement said.
Serhiy “Flash” Beskresnikov, a Ukrainian military communications expert and advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky on military electronics, in Sunday comments to Euromaidan Press said: “I do not confirm or deny this information from the Russians. I do not know why this caused such a stir in Russian media since such technologies have long been nothing unique.”
Companies owned by the world’s richest individual, Musk, on or about Oct. 14 imposed a slowdown on SpaceX-associated terminals operated in Ukraine, so that if the terminal moved at more than 160 kph (100 mph) its communications would stop working. The degradation effectively made Ukrainian strikes by Starlink- and Starshield-equipped aircraft impossible, and at the same time made high-speed Ukrainian-developed interceptor drones used by the AFU against Russian jet-propelled drones useless.
Musk said the White House ordered SpaceX to impose the speed cap while White House officials said it was Musk’s idea. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky blamed his US counterpart, Donald Trump. According to Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials, dozens of million-dollar drones en route to Russia fell out of the sky the first day the slowdown went into effect.
Sharp international reaction to the US attack on Ukrainian drone strike capacity, along with a congressional order to SpaceX to submit to a formal congressional investigation about the speed limit with hearings starting in January, helped restore Starlink and Starshield service to AFU units by Oct. 24.
The AFU, according to Ukrainian media reports, began employing HiSKY’s smallest and lowest-cost terminal, a 6-kilogram (13-pound) device called a Sirius 16x16 Ku, in drone strikes against Russia in mid-October while the Musk/White House-imposed limits to SpaceX-provided service still were in effect. The first debris of a Ukrainian HiSKY-equipped drone was shot down by Russian air defense forces shortly before the end of the month, those reports said.
According to a Sunday article by the Ukrainian research group DP Defpulse, AFU use of HiSKY technology is not fully confirmed but highly probable. The system gives AFU operators the advantage of communications links transferring 2 Mbps of data in concentrated beams that hop from high-orbit geostationary satellite to geostationary satellite as needed, making the electronic tether between drone and operator almost impossible to jam, the report said.
The main disadvantage to Ukrainian pilots is that Starlink or Starshield terminals using the SpaceX network and a massive constellation of moving, low orbit satellites offer 50-250+ Mbps data transfer capacity, making piloting a long-range drone visually possible only via Starlink, because data transfer volume using HiSKY technology is too limited. A lower-volume HiSKY link would nonetheless be capable of transferring course corrections to a drone in flight, making possible redirection of individual drones in a drone strike package to a precise target, the report said.
From Oct. 15 to Oct. 29, Ukraine paused its oil refinery strikes against Russia following a US request to do so and White House threats that the US might retaliate against Ukraine if Ukraine kept on attacking Russia’s energy sector, which, according to the White House, was driving up prices at the pump for US motorists.
Overnight on Oct. 30-Nov. 1, Ukraine seemingly defied the US with a new wave of drone attacks against Russian oil refineries.
Among the facilities attacked were the Novokuibyshevsk refinery in Samara Oblast (Oct. 30), the Kstovo refinery in Nizhniy Novogorod Oblast (Nov. 1), the Samara oil dispatch station (Nov. 2), Yaroslavl’s Yanos refinery (Nov. 3), the Ryazan oil refinery (Nov. 5), Krasnodar’s Afipsky oil refinery (Nov. 6), a second Saratov refinery (Nov. 7) and St. Petersburg’s KINEF refinery near the village Kirishi overnight Sunday-Monday.
According to reports in local media and overhead satellite imagery recorded by the US worldwide fire watch agency FIRMS, the Ukrainian strike packages hitting Nizhniy Novogorod, Yaroslavl and Ryazan were more accurate than strikes in past months, with aircraft concentrating on distillation towers and cracking equipment, and setting multiple fires that sometimes burned for days. On Monday afternoon, some 12 hours after the Ukrainian attack, more than two-thirds of the KINEF refinery was still in flames, FIRMS data showed.
Stefan Korshak is the Kyiv Post Senior Defense Correspondent. He is from Houston Texas, is a Yalie and since the mid-1990s has worked as correspondent/photographer for newswire, newspapers, television and radio. He has reported from five wars but most enjoys doing articles on wildlife and nature. You can read his weekly blog on the Russo-Ukraine War on Facebook, Substack and Medium. His new book on the 2022 Siege of Mariupol is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.
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