The Role of the Space Domain in the Russia-Ukraine War

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Introduction

Since the invasion of February 2022, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine has become an attritional grind, inflicting heavy losses on both sides, and driving a race for tactical and strategic advantage through technology. Alongside rapid innovation in artificial intelligence (AI) and drone technology, the conflict continues to demonstrate the profound and growing influence of outer space. Space operations have emerged as important enablers of Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to resist and drive back the Russian attackers. Space capabilities are also documenting the conflict in real-time. In turn, space has emerged both as an arena of intensifying inter-state competition and as a domain where non-state actors, including private companies and NGOs, play an increasingly hands-on role in shaping conflict dynamics and outcomes.

Notable, too, is the growing convergence of space technology with AI. This reflects the acceleration of a broader effort by global powers to bring a digital revolution to how they approach the command, control, and execution of multi-domain operations. This effort predates the conflict, but the invasion of Ukraine has created an opportunity to test emerging technological concepts and tactics that make use of converging space and AI technologies.

At the same time, the growing reliance on interconnected space-based systems and infrastructure has introduced new vulnerabilities that can be exploited to disrupt, coerce, or attack. This growing interconnectedness creates risks of the conflict spilling over into orbit or across borders to affect national security.

Against this backdrop, this article examines the space domain's role to date in the Russia-Ukraine war. It first considers how space has shaped the war, before exploring how space technology is used in combination with AI – covering the direct role of satellite communications (SATCOM), positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT), and Earth observation (EO) services. 

The intensification of strategic competition in outer space

Space has emerged as the fifth recognised domain of military operations, alongside land, air, maritime, and cyber and electromagnetic (EM). Since the Cold War and the Soviet launch of Sputnik I in 1957, space was expected by many defence planners to become an active warfighting domain, though to date it has played only a supporting role to military forces in other (terrestrial) domains, including through the provision of SATCOM, PNT and EO (space-based intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance [ISR]). Space has consequently become a critical enabler of military power projection, offering global reach, connectivity, and a ‘high ground’ from which to observe the terrestrial battlespace. 

As well as having tactical and operational impacts, satellites have also come to fulfil roles vital to maintaining strategic stability. These include nuclear command and control and missile early warning, and use of EO/ISR satellites as ‘national technical means of verification’ to monitor the enforcement of nuclear arms treaties such as those between the United States and post-Soviet Russia.

Space has thereby become an important arena for strategic competition, and plays a vital role in almost all sectors of the global economy and critical national infrastructure. Given the dangerous combination of dependency, vulnerability, and growing contestation, governments and space experts have increasingly warned about the risks to security and safety. Some have touted the domain as the likely next frontier and future of war, while a growing number of nations have called for regulation of space-based weapons and other escalatory activities. 

Space technology’s role in Ukraine 

Access to, or denial of, communications can have decisive effects in any military engagement. The conflict in Ukraine has shown the vital importance of SATCOM, PNT and EO/ISR services to situational awareness and command and control (C2) on the modern battlefield. It has also demonstrated the convergence of competition in space with the contest to achieve information and decision advantage. Russian attempts at jamming, spoofing, or hacking satellite networks supporting the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been a feature of the war since its outset. In February 2022, for example, only an hour before the invasion, Russia launched a cyberattack on the ground-based infrastructure of ViaSat’s KA-SAT network, causing thousands of European users including the Ukrainian government and military to experience widespread disruption.

Though the Ukrainians were able to adapt quickly to this attack, with Western help, the ViaSat incident presaged the central role that commercial space systems would come to play in supporting the early Ukrainian war effort. Even 5-10 years ago, access to space capabilities was limited to only the most powerful states, primarily the US, China and Russia, with even major economies and global players such as the UK, France, Germany, or Japan having only a handful of military satellites. Since the invasion in February 2022, however, Ukraine has been able to offset its lack of sovereign space capabilities by buying in commercial data and services from a fast-burgeoning market, primarily from private US companies.

The proliferation and sophistication of such commercial space services provide huge opportunities to Ukraine, enabling it to compete in and through the space domain. Even for better-funded militaries with their own ISR constellations, commercial EO satellites can provide more coverage, added redundancy, and improved revisit rates compared to high-demand, low-density government-owned spy satellites. Such commercial assets supplement the sensing capabilities of government systems, reducing costs and offering capabilities such as electro-optical sensors, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and AI-assisted data analytics and mapping.

Private firms can also move more quickly than government when launching a new service. Within days of Russia's invasion, US firm SpaceX sent 5,000 terminal kits to Ukraine, which enable communications via its mega-constellation of small satellites in low Earth orbit. These were used to provide off-grid Internet access and connectivity, enabling critical battlefield communications and information sharing. They also connected civilian population centres cut off by the fighting and Russia’s destruction of cell towers and other infrastructure. The number of terminals had risen to 15,000 by June 2022, and at one point, Ukraine reportedly accounted for around 58% of total worldwide downloads using Starlink. Due to the importance of this distributed infrastructure, civilian volunteers in Ukraine are actively repairing, even extensively damaged, terminals, such as those affected by or shelling, weather or voltage spikes. Overall, the Ukrainian government has benefited from breaking the traditional barriers between military and civilian technological resources, demonstrating a new paradigm in rapid acquisitions, conflict response and infrastructure resilience.  

However, Ukraine’s reliance on Starlink has also revealed the risks of leaving access to space-based services in the hands of a few private actors. On several occasions, Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX reportedly risked Ukraine’s connectivity to the communications network and limited the use of Starlink to control Ukrainian unmanned systems operating in the Black Sea against Russia’s naval fleet. Recent reports also suggest Russia is now using Starlink terminals in its own offensive, seemingly circumventing the geofencing technology designed to limit use in unauthorised locations, even as it also seeks to jam the service over Ukrainian territory. Though the terminals may have been procured through third parties to bypass sanctions, and Starlink has not provided these directly, it remains to be seen whether the company will take proactive steps to prevent further use by Russian forces.

The commercial market for Earth observation data and services has also played an important role in supporting military operations, as well as helping sway the international community in Ukraine’s favour. Companies such as the US-based Maxar are capturing high-quality images of the war through space-based visual, infrared, radar and electromagnetic sensing, often enhanced through machine learning to improve the speed and quality of subsequent image analysis. EO technologies for imagery intelligence have been deployed in a variety of military uses, from tracking equipment and personnel, through to revealing the environmental conditions on the ground. EO services are also used by global media and non-governmental organisations to track human rights abuses and war crimes. Data provided through EO have generated evidence of attacks against civilian targets and the ground truth on Russia and Ukraine’s military position across frontlines. Being able to debunk false narratives in a contested information environment has proven critical against Russia’s disinformation campaigns. Satellite imagery of civilian casualties in Bucha in 2022, for example, prompted international outrage and increased support for Ukrainian forces, boosting diplomatic and materiel support.

Interfering with Global Positioning System (GPS) signals is another core part of Russian tactics to degrade Ukraine’s capabilities and exploit the reliance of many guided munitions, unmanned systems, and other equipment on space-based PNT. GPS-guided weapons are potentially vulnerable to Russian electronic warfare (EW) operations, reducing their range, precision and utility, especially where back-ups (such as inertial guidance or terrain mapping) are not available or fully effective. This increases the risk of weapons missing their targets, requiring that more be employed in saturation attacks to compensate for the lack of precision, and also increasing the risk of collateral damage. In the face of such threats, there are efforts underway to develop alternative sources of PNT in areas where GPS access has been lost or denied, as well as to proactively target and degrade Russia’s EW systems on the ground. 

Experimenting with a digital and AI revolution on the battlefield  

The war in Ukraine comes against the backdrop of wider competition for technological advantage between military powers. The convergence of innovations in areas such as space, AI, autonomy, robotics, materials, computing, telecommunications, and sensors is expected to broaden the spectrum of possible tools for Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber & Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (C5ISTAR). Countries such as the US, China, Russia and European NATO Allies like the UK are competing to gain the upper hand both on and off the battlefield through superior use of data, analytics and connectivity to make better, faster decisions and ultimately outthink and outmanoeuvre the enemy. 

The war has provided new impetus to this drive for digital and AI innovation, and new opportunities for battlefield experimentation and learning. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have demonstrated considerable ingenuity, integrating a diverse range of information sources and AI tools into ‘kill chains’ to help identify and rapidly engage Russian targets. Similarly, new digital technologies have been employed for diverse use cases such as: 

• Automated analysis for real-time battle damage assessment (BDA);
• Facial recognition for a wide variety of tasks, such as to help detect infiltrators, identify corpses, fight disinformation or reunify families;
• Imagery analysis for open-source intelligence (OSINT) or geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) using commercial EO data, geotagging, and mapping tools;
• Voice transcription and translation to help Ukrainians intercept and understand Russian communications through a searchable text database, especially through Large Language Models (LLMs);
• Support to strike, ISR and logistics operations using unmanned systems or loitering munitions (e.g., small unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with explosive payloads).

External parties such as the US, NATO and China are all seeking to incorporate insights from the battlefields of Ukraine into their own evolving concepts for future joint operations. This is reflected in ongoing efforts to fold lessons from Ukraine into concepts development, such as the US’s Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) or NATO’s Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) concepts, as well as new capability programmes to deliver and field the next generation of military systems for space- and AI-enabled C5ISTAR and other purposes.  

Space infrastructure under threat 

Just as space has affected the war in Ukraine, so has the war had spill-over effects on space security. Targeting space infrastructure can be a method of deterrent or coercive signalling, as exemplified by Russia's provocative testing of a direct-ascent anti-satellite (ASAT) missile in late 2021 by blowing up an old satellite – an attempt to intimidate Kyiv and deter NATO, which only served to recklessly endanger other satellites and even Russia's own cosmonauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Exploiting vulnerabilities in space infrastructure can also be a deniable, scalable, and relatively low-cost way to degrade or deny the adversary access to certain services through kinetic, electronic, or cyber means. It is unsurprising, then, that after the early attacks on Viasat, Russian attempts to hack, jam, spoof and otherwise disrupt Ukraine’s use of space-based services – while stopping short of kinetic activity that could escalate the conflict by provoking a Western response – have become a recurring feature of the conflict.

Due to the growing interconnectedness of many commercial and military space assets and services, even temporary and reversible attacks on one point of the chain can have a ripple effect on the entire network. The cascading effects of cyberattacks or EW against space services can also potentially affect neighbouring or neutral countries. For instance, the February 2022 cyberattack against the “consumer-oriented partition of (Viasat’s) KA-SAT (telecommunications) network” impacted an American-owned, French-operated and UK-subsidised satellite network. As well as Ukrainian military users, the attack cut off tens of thousands of Europeans’ access to high-speed internet and turned off 5,800 German wind turbines for several months. This reflects a wider pattern of new security risks arising from the complex dependencies of many sectors and areas of terrestrial space infrastructure. For example, the French Civil Aviation Authority reported that Russian military equipment designed to counter GPS-guided missiles inadvertently disrupted commercial satellite navigation in Finland, creating in-flight issues for pilots. Even Russia reportedly hesitates to conduct large-scale GPS-jamming, given the risk of disrupting the connection of their own GLONASS receivers and thus undermining its own operations.

Conclusion

Two years on from the full-scale invasion of February 2022, Ukraine finds itself locked in an existential conflict. This has not only had profound spill-over effects for global politics and the world economy, but also brought renewed focus on the vital role that space plays in underpinning modern militaries, societies, and critical infrastructure. The battlefields of Ukraine have also become sites of rapid innovation, experimentation, and adaptation, including in the combination of commercial SATCOM, EO and PNT with AI, drones, and other technologies to drive novel approaches to C5ISTAR. Private companies are increasingly influential in everything from competition and conflict between nation-states at the strategic level to the tactical opportunities and rules of engagement on the battlefield. In these regards, then, as in so many others, the ongoing war in Ukraine serves as a lesson – and a warning – to other nations in the West looking to prepare themselves for future conflict.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the views of The Alan Turing Institute or any other organisation.