Russia is racing to build its own version of Starlink after losing access to the real thing, but for now the fight over satellite communications above the battlefield is still being settled by one man: Elon Musk.

Bureau 1440, a Russian aerospace company, is developing a low-Earth-orbit broadband network called Rassvet as a domestic alternative to Starlink, the US-built system Russian forces themselves used, informally, earlier in the war before Ukraine and SpaceX moved to cut them off, Ukrainska Pravda reported. Little has been publicly disclosed about the project, but it could become a major factor in the war within a year, according to the outlet's own reporting.

The stakes go beyond connectivity. President Vladimir Putin has himself floated using satellite internet to control drones, and Ukrainian officials and analysts warn that a working Rassvet would give Russian forces a more autonomous military communications system — one less dependent on ground infrastructure, foreign satellite operators or the electronic-warfare-vulnerable channels Russia currently relies on.

Two years of Starlink tug-of-war

The immediate backdrop to Rassvet is a running, two-sided tug-of-war over Starlink itself, in which Musk has repeatedly made the decisive call.

Russian forces had informally used Starlink terminals, obtained via resellers and captured equipment, for years without SpaceX blocking them outright. That changed after a Russian long-range strike drone flew undetected into central Kyiv in late January, evading Ukrainian air defences. Mykhailo Fedorov — then Ukraine's defence minister, and the official who had originally brought Starlink to Ukraine in 2022 as digital transformation minister — presented Musk with evidence that Russian forces were using Starlink connectivity to guide such drones past Ukraine's jamming and air defences.

Musk agreed on their first call: “OK, I'll do it,” he told Fedorov, according to the New Voice of Ukraine.

Ukraine and SpaceX then rolled out a mass-registration scheme, using the government's Diia app, to strip out unauthorised Russian terminals. Russian frontline units reported losing up to 90% of their internet connectivity once the block took effect in early February; one adviser to Fedorov described the effect on Russian forces as “not a problem, a catastrophe,” and Ukrainian officials said assaults stalled in multiple sectors of the front as a result.

Six months on, the roles have reversed. Ukraine is now asking Musk for the opposite favour — to lift Starlink's own geographic restrictions so Ukrainian forces can use the network to guide long-range strike drones deep into Russian territory, rather than only within Ukraine's own borders.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy raised the request directly with President Donald Trump at a White House meeting on July 28, asking Trump to arrange a meeting with Musk to discuss it; Trump gave no clear answer, according to the Atlantic. Fedorov has continued working the request through back channels since leaving office, without success. “As of this moment, there is no positive decision,” one of his allies said.

Musk's own camp has said the request is being refused because “it's time to make a deal” with Moscow, according to associates of Fedorov cited in the same reporting. Musk has cited concerns that enabling deep strikes into Russia risks escalating the war. It is a striking reversal from February, when Musk acted within hours to help Ukraine defend Kyiv — and a reminder that a US commercial decision, not a US general, is calling the shots over Ukraine’s plans to extend its drone war onto Russian soil.

This is not the first time Musk blocked military plans because he didn’t like them. A Ukrainian drone-boat strike on Russia's Black Sea fleet at Sevastopol in September 2022 was simply turned off remotely by SpaceX because Musk had similar escalation concerns, in an episode analysts at the Irregular Warfare Initiative have since cited as an example of a corporate executive holding what amounts to unelected, unaccountable leverage over a war between nation states.

The intelligence tap Washington keeps turning on and off

Satellite connectivity is not the only US-controlled input to Ukraine's targeting that has been switched on and off through the war. Washington briefly suspended intelligence sharing and satellite-derived targeting data with Kyiv in March 2025, following the famous “you’ve got no cards” blow up between Trump and Zelenskiy in the Oval Office, a pause a Ukrainian officer said cost hundreds of lives before it was lifted weeks later once Kyiv agreed to a US-proposed 30-day ceasefire framework.

During that gap, European governments stepped in. French President Emmanuel Macron said in January that France alone was supplying roughly two-thirds of the intelligence Ukraine was receiving — a claim Kyrylo Budanov, now Zelenskiy's chief of staff, later disputed, saying Ukraine remained “critically dependent” on the United States specifically for satellite imagery and early-warning data.

By August, US-Ukraine intelligence sharing had been rebuilt to its pre-freeze peak, with both Washington and Kyiv crediting the restored flow of satellite data and attack warnings for sharpening Ukraine's long-range strikes inside Russia in recent weeks — underlining how much of Ukraine's targeting capability, even now, still runs through decisions taken outside Kyiv.

What Bureau 1440 has actually built

Bureau 1440 began in 2020 as MegaFon 1440, a project of Russia's second-largest mobile operator, MegaFon, under IT holding company X Holding, itself part of the telecoms group USM controlled by sanctioned, Kremlin-linked oligarch Alisher Usmanov.

It became a standalone company by the end of 2021, after Russia's earlier satellite-internet efforts — the Efir programme launched in 2017 with a planned RUB300bn ($5.1bn) budget for 288 satellites, later folded into the broader Sfera constellation programme — failed to attract the private investment Moscow needed and were shelved.

Sanctioned lender VTB Bank bought a 15% stake in the project for RUB2bn ($27mn) in 2021. Usmanov sold his stake in X Holding to founder Anton Cherepennikov in 2022, at which point the project was renamed Bureau 1440; X Holding itself was placed under US sanctions in February 2023, and the Rassvet programme was added to the EU's most recent sanctions package, Ukrainska Pravda reports.

Bureau 1440 launched three experimental Rassvet-1 satellites in June 2023 to test ground stations and onboard systems, followed by three full-scale Rassvet-2 prototypes in 2024 that trialled laser inter-satellite links — the technology, also used by Starlink, that lets satellites relay data to each other rather than only to ground stations, extending coverage over oceans and other areas without local infrastructure. Bureau 1440 says those tests moved roughly 200 GB of data at peak speeds of 10 Gbps and successfully linked a satellite to a user terminal using 5G non-terrestrial-network technology.

The company launched its first operational batch of 16 satellites in March, followed by a second batch at the end of July; according to Serhii Beskrestnov, a Ukrainian presidential adviser on communications known as Flash, roughly 40 Rassvet satellites are now in orbit, according to Ukrainska Pravda.

Bureau 1440 aims to reach commercial service in 2027 with a 250-satellite constellation — Flash's own estimate is that 200-250 satellites are the minimum for continuous, stable coverage — before expanding to around 730 satellites by 2030 and more than 900 by 2035. That would still leave Rassvet a fraction of the size of Starlink's own constellation of more than 10,000 satellites, built on a mass-production model Russia's sanctioned space industry is unlikely to replicate; one aerospace engineer, Dmytro Khmara of Space Cossacks, estimates a single Rassvet ground terminal could cost hundreds of times more than its Starlink equivalent.

Rassvet's satellites orbit at roughly 800km — higher than Starlink's — in a configuration designed to prioritise coverage of Russia's Arctic north and the shipping and military infrastructure there, rather than Starlink's mid-latitude focus. Ground terminals weigh 15kg, measure 60cm x 60cm, are rated for -40C to +40C operation and are designed for data speeds of up to 1 Gbps.

Militarily, analysts say Rassvet's most likely near-term use is communications within Russian military units, partially replacing the Starlink access Russian troops lost in February, and eventually shifting some communications off vulnerable geostationary satellites onto the lower-latency LEO network. Because Russia can concentrate its satellites' coverage over a specific area rather than needing the full constellation everywhere at once, engineer Dmytro Khmara says Moscow could field a usable military capability — for video links to command posts, drone control and ground robotic systems — over eastern and southern Ukraine well before the full commercial constellation is complete, even though the system's higher orbit means greater signal latency than Starlink.