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However, Russian forces have reportedly caused widespread disruption to Starlink for the first time, causing serious problems for Ukraine’s frontline troops. The New York Times.
Members of Ukraine’s 92nd Assault Brigade spoke to The New York Times and said that Starlink communications had become extremely slow as Russian troops advanced across the northern border earlier this month.
“The day before the attack, we suddenly lost power,” a soldier known by the call sign “Ajax” told the outlet. “It became extremely slow.”
“We are losing the electronic warfare battle,” Ajax said.
Ukraine’s Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said in a recent interview that Russia is testing new, advanced tools to “degrade the quality of Starlink connections,” according to The New York Times. “We are going to degrade the quality of Starlink connections, because they are very important to us,” Russia said in a recent interview.
He added that Ukraine was working with SpaceX to resolve the outage.
Brian Weeden, chief program officer at the nonprofit Secure World Foundation, previously told BI that Russia was having difficulty disrupting Ukraine’s Starlink service.
This is likely because its satellites operate at a much lower altitude than geostationary satellites, making their signals more strongly concentrated.
Starlink satellites are closer to Earth, which means lower latency (the delay between a user action and a network response), which speeds up activities like streaming, online gaming and video conferencing.
According to the Times, Russia may have improved its signal-jamming techniques by using more powerful and precise jamming equipment.
A drone pilot who uses the call sign “Cartel” told the Times that Starlink is too slow, forcing soldiers to rely on text messaging apps.
“The first few hours there was a lot of movement on the front. The enemy was moving. We were moving. We had to communicate quickly,” he said, adding that “everything took time.”
The Russian Defense Ministry has not yet commented, but an official who heads the country’s electronic warfare activity told state media in April that the military had developed capabilities to counter Starlink, the media reported.
The Wall Street Journal In April, it was reported that Russia had illegally acquired Starlink equipment on the black market in order to coordinate attacks on Ukraine.
The media reported that Russians are buying the technology from foreign countries, including the United States, and smuggling it to Russian forces in Ukraine.
SpaceX, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry and the Kremlin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.