Telekomkrigföring
2024-05-29
The Russian military continues to ramp up its ability to disrupt the Starlink internet capabilities Ukraine’s troops use to coordinate their forces, collect intel and launch drone attacks on Russian frontline positions, causing mass “outages” in the Kharkov area of the front and playing a role in the rapid pace of Russia’s recent advances.
That’s according to Ukrainian officials, soldiers and electronic warfare specialists queried by the New York Times to find out why Russia’s EW operations had slowed frontline troops’ ability to communicate using Starlink internet to a crawl.
The report warned that if Russia’s efforts to disrupt Starlink “continue to succeed, it could mark a tactical shift in the conflict, highlighting Ukraine’s vulnerability and dependence on the service provided by Mr. Musk’s company,” while raising “broader questions about Starlink’s reliability against a technically sophisticated adversary.”
“We’re losing the electronic warfare fight,” a deputy commander from the Ukrainian 92nd Assault Brigade’s drone battalion told the newspaper. “One day before the attacks, it just shut down. It became super, super slow,” he complained.
A Ukrainian drone operator confirmed the connectivity issues. “During the first hours the front line was very dynamic. The enemy was moving, and we were moving as well. We needed to be to be fast in communicating,” the soldier said, complaining that the loss of Starlink connectivity “made everything more complicated” and “time consuming.”
Experts from NATO countries aren’t entirely sure what’s causing the signal loss – improved and more precise Russian jamming equipment, or a new breed of special electronic warfare weapons mounted on drones to confuse GPS signals. The report also didn’t rule out that “solar storms” may be responsible for random outages.
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