Ukraine faces race against the clock as technology edge fades – expert

Radio NV: Let’s start with the Starlink question — and satellite communications more broadly. On one hand, the Russians are using electronic warfare systems to counter Starlink. One such system was recently struck in Gelendzhik. On the other hand, they are launching their own satellites. How successfully is the enemy managing to counter Starlink?

Ihor Lutsenko: As people like to say these days: the Starlink window is starting to close. This was entirely predictable. In our technological war, there are no permanent technical solutions that guarantee a stable result indefinitely. There never have been, and there probably never will be.

Even a super-technology like Starlink, which is ideally suited for many aspects of warfare, is not immune. Those who see it as a weapon against them — or a potential weapon against them (and here I’m nodding toward China) — are finding solutions and trying to scale them.

Fortunately, for now it is not so easily scalable that the Russians can cover all their vulnerable points with electronic warfare against Starlink. That is not happening yet.

And why won’t it happen? Because they physically lack the systems, or because it’s too expensive?

It’s expensive. This is cutting-edge technology that is still, in a sense, raw. It doesn’t always deliver a complete result. Sometimes it only slows Starlink down rather than shutting it down entirely.

But we have to understand that we need two things here. First, we must be prepared for the reality that even this super-Starlink of ours — and it really is a super-technology with enormous remaining potential — will become less and less effective in the form we currently have it, because of Russian countermeasures. Second, we still need to fight for our own technological sovereignty.

The fact that our president at a certain point publicly appealed to [U.S. President Donald] Trump and to Elon Musk, saying we need Starlink over Russia and so on — that’s all well and good. But we should have started moving in this direction back in 2022 so that we would have our own satellites, or our own ground-based or airborne communications systems that could replace Starlink.

We had enough time, by the way, to at least partially hedge ourselves and try to address the problem the president has highlighted — namely the rapid ballistic missiles that launch from literally just across our border, which we still cannot hit with anything. Sometimes we can’t even sound the air-raid alert in time. Yes, they launch from close range. And the way to deal with that problem was not only through appeals to Trump and Elon Musk, but through actual technological steps of our own.

That’s how it happened. But we have to understand that without building our own technological sovereignty, we will have no real prospect in this war, in my view. We will not be able to build victory 100 percent on someone else’s solutions, on semi-military solutions, and especially not on civilian solutions of the kind Starlink represents. These are only temporary fixes. We have to harness ourselves to the work.

We also have to look at what the enemy is doing. And the enemy is saying exactly what I’m saying: they are building their own satellite system. They are building so-called mesh networks so they can strike targets 100 or 200 kilometers inside our territory. And unfortunately, that is happening.

So here is another example — not just declarations. Here is another example of how we need to act in this war.

This is a global war, in the sense that it is reshaping the balance of power. Tomorrow or the day after, Starlink will no longer be the force it is today. And any country that is not prepared for that will instantly lose in any military conflict.

Are you pointing to the deployment of Russia’s Rassvet satellite communications systems as a model Ukraine should follow?

Yes. We have to understand that the enemy is deploying, and at a certain point they may even produce better, more war-focused technologies than Starlink currently offers — if things continue as they are now, and if we do not have the same kind of dialogue and technical cooperation with our partners.

As for the president’s request to Elon Musk for permission to use Starlink over the territory of the Russian Federation. As we know, Musk refused to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy when the Ukrainian president was in the United States. So the question arises: do you see any realistic prospect or hope that Musk will come around and grant us that permission so we can fight Russia more effectively?

This is exactly where I’m heading: it is unlikely that Elon Musk will give us permission to operate specifically over Russia. From his side, if such a step were taken… it will not be taken, because it would essentially mean Elon Musk and his company SpaceX entering the war on our side against Russia. They absolutely do not want those kinds of problems for themselves — becoming a party to the conflict. Allowing not everyone, but specifically one side — the Ukrainian side — to use Starlink on Russian territory is a political utopia. It will not happen.

If there were an ultra-loyal-to-Ukraine president of the United States, then it might be possible to construct a legal framework under which (and only if Elon Musk agreed) all the legal risks could be shifted from SpaceX onto the American state, so the terminals could at least be used for reconnaissance. I’m not even talking about strikes — just reconnaissance over Russian territory. But we understand that…

I understand it’s not only a legal problem. It’s also a question of brand and business development, because this is a civilian, commercial technology.

Exactly. That’s why I say it depends on a whole series of “ifs.” If instead of Trump we had some “Trumpenko,” an ethnic Ukrainian who loved our homeland as his former one and said we must help with every fiber of our being, and so on. But of course that will not happen. And likewise, if Elon Musk said, “Okay, fine, we’ll help with the technical solutions, but the American state has to take responsibility for it” — that will not happen either. It’s clearly fantasy.

So the Russians are moving along their path, Europe is moving along its path, China is moving along its path. If we want to survive, we have to find our place in that lineup. Because we do still have some school of space technologies, some school of radio technologies, and so on.

This could be done either together with our closest allies in Europe — and I hope something of the sort is already happening — or by going sovereign with individual satellites, the way one of the funds once acquired capacity that the Russians are now also actively countering, by the way.

We could have gone down that path. Unfortunately, we have lost a great deal.

If I may, I’d like to raise one more topic right now. Look: we can see that the Russians are trying to erase the humiliation and the horror that really did befall them over the past few months — the mass burning of oil refineries, the big Wildberries warehouses. Above all, the Russians understand that the world is increasingly seeing them as a weak country. And right now they are restoring their image as a strong country. They are hitting Kyiv with ballistic missiles. They have closed the ports of Odesa to us and even created partial problems on the Danube. So what will be advertised around the world now are the strikes on the capital — almost daily strikes on Kyiv. And what will also be advertised around the world is that Russia has completely blocked maritime traffic in the Black Sea, effectively cutting Ukraine off from the sea. And we will have to respond.

That includes the fact that we actively use Starlink, including in areas close to the Russian coast. It is used there the same way it is used across all of Ukraine. But we need to understand that we also have to advertise some kind of response of our own. We have to stay ahead of the Russians in this information race at all times.

That is extremely important, because it creates distrust of Russia and trust in Ukraine. I consider that the most important capital in the world right now.

And the question now is what we are capable of. We have shown that we can strike targets. We can close the Caspian Sea to the Russians. There is now an issue with Iran; I hope it stays on a diplomatic track and that we ultimately achieve a situation in which the Caspian is de facto closed to the Russians without creating problems for us with Iran, which is also a potential threat.

But the question is: why are we leaving the Baltic Sea alone? The distance to the Baltic is the same as the distance to the Caspian from our territory. And we can strike targets there on a sustained basis just as well. The traffic there is many times — hundreds of times — greater than on the Caspian. That is essentially where the main “Koschei’s death ” is located. That is where the largest flows of oil products and oil move. Gas is less, but there is gas as well.

Then I have a logical question: why, Ihor?

Right now, that question has to be put to all of us: why? Because perhaps not all of us have fully realized that the Russians have completely closed the sea to us. I won’t even mention the fact that, unfortunately, we never developed the rail capacity for the contingency of a maritime blockade.

We somehow decided that we had broken through the Black Sea and that it would last forever. No. And we still have not prepared — above all diplomatically and in the media, around the world.

Look: we are being blockaded. Our grain is no longer moving. Our grain is burning. No one can reach us. We are being blockaded. If, God forbid, we did not have food growing on this fertile land of ours, we would already be preparing for famine here.

The point is that in this war we now need to prepare for a Baltic scenario. I believe that is extremely important for our survival. Starlink works in the Baltic region. No additional permissions are required. And if some other solution is needed, other solutions exist there too. Right now there is a need to push back against what Russia has hung on us — above all the terror in the capital, especially the ballistic terror, and the complete closure of the Black Sea to Ukraine. Full blockade.

I’d like to return to our own territories. If we imagine that we are not ready, that we never launched satellites, that we did nothing or tried and failed — what then, if our Starlink capabilities for strikes on the occupied territories are substantially reduced? Do we simply lose the mid-range strike component? Or are there alternatives, Ihor?

I don’t think anyone is going to completely ban us from operating over the occupied territories in the near future. And completely blanketing those territories so that we cannot work there is also an unattainable task for the Russians right now.

Yes, they will be able to close off certain key areas. They will try to cover the so-called Novorossiya highway, for example, and the airfields in Crimea. And that will be about it. I think Donetsk, Luhansk and the roads into those major cities will be their focus. But all the other territories are unlikely to be closed off at this stage, first because these systems really are expensive and highly visible, and second because we can strike them as well. That way we can achieve some operational success: first we fly an expensive asset in and take out their jammer, and then cheaper assets come in and do whatever needs to be done.

But the long-term perspective for us has to be that the state directs all resources toward finding technical solutions that overcome the enemy’s resistance.

Even today, in my view, the main challenge to our defense capability is not mobilization. It is technical capability — overcoming things like Starlink jamming, creating our own mesh networks, developing anti-ballistic systems, and developing our own ballistic systems, meaning Ukrainian ballistic missiles. That is where the focus must be.

The technological headquarters under the president finally has to start working at full capacity. We in activist circles pushed very hard for it. A technological headquarters was even created, but the president has not yet run it at full power. It is time to do that.

We have to understand that the foundation of our defense capability is not the bureaucratic vertical. It is Ukrainian technology companies: Ukrainian Armor, Fire Point, and others like them. Those companies are where our progress is happening today — above all in the war.

The entire defense system needs to be built around that. But it requires a very serious rethinking and a very strong shift in mindset. Because previously we were all used to fighting with people. That’s how it was; earlier wars were built on the idea that the human being is the main bio-robot and everything revolves around that. That is no longer the case. Now you can make do with fewer people, provided you have the appropriate technological solutions. To put it bluntly: if Elon Musk allowed it, we would achieve ten times more.