Analysis: Starlink disruption exposes limits of Ukrainian battlefield reliance on U.S. private company.

Robert Magyar Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, announced on September 15, 2025, on his Telegram channel that Starlink had gone down along the entire front, with a service gradually recovering later. The message spread fast among drone teams and signals officers: this network has become part of the battlefield’s architecture. It is not a weapon in itself, but it props up many that matter by keeping targeting posts and small-unit operators connected when fiber is cut and cell towers are jammed. Independent outlets later described a short global Starlink outage the same morning, which tracks with what units reported on the ground. This outage highlights the dependance of Ukrainian armed forces on a U.S. private company.
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Starlink provides Ukrainian forces with fast satellite internet enabling secure communications, drone control and battlefield coordination even when traditional networks are down (Picture source: Ukraine Military Center).

What Ukraine uses on the ground is a hardware that soldiers can move, power and conceal. A standard Starlink kit is a compact phased-array antenna roughly the size of a small backpack panel, a router, cabling and a simple mount. The dish points electronically, so setup is quick and alignment is forgiving. Power draw for the common terminals typically runs in the double digits of watts, surging higher in cold or when the terminal is fighting for link margin. Units fix them on rooftops, vehicles or poles, sometimes dug into shallow pits or skirted with mesh to lower the signature. For mechanized and mobile teams, a higher grade flat high performance antenna exists, designed for permanent installation on vehicles with a wider look angle and more robust environmental sealing. The system works in places where nothing else does, allowing Ukrainian forces to have a good connection wherever they are on the battlefield.

The strenght of Starlink is its constellation: thousands of low Earth orbit spacecraft orbit at a few hundred kilometers, assuring a reliable connectivity. That matters for drones flown by FPV teams or long range marine operators who need a live picture and responsive control. It also matters for software that does targeting and deconfliction in real time. The network is increasingly stitched together with optical cross-links, so traffic can hop satellite to satellite before dropping to a ground station. In practice, that has meant Ukrainian users can get an uplink even when local infrastructure is damaged, or when a ground station is hundreds of kilometers away. The kit is weather-hardened enough to survive the wet and the cold. Plug in a small generator or a good battery pack and the node stays alive.

On the battlefield, that connectivity translates into very specific effects. Drone operators stream video to a section commander who talks to an artillery fire direction center that can compute a solution in seconds. Recon teams push imagery from tree lines or upper floors, annotate it, then hand it to a strike cell without moving from cover. Logistics elements keep tabs on fuel and repair tasks through shared spreadsheets that would be mundane anywhere else but are transformative under fire. When Starlink blinks, the chain gets longer and slower. During the September outage, some FPV teams reportedly delayed flights and others fell back to line-of-sight radios. The outage ended quickly, service returned, and units carried on. Still, it shows a dependance towards the system: without it, Ukrainian forces communicate with less efficiency.

Ukraine has given a part of its operational tempo to a service run by a private company under the control of a single executive. That is a strategic dependency that Ukraine tolerates, given the operational benefits this brings. There is a documented case from earlier in the war when Starlink coverage was curtailed over parts of occupied territory during a Ukrainian push. Either it is geofencing, policy, caution, or a miscommunication, the effect was the same to the units that lost the link. The Pentagon has since contracted for service and secure variants that harden access, Kyiv has diversified funding with European partners, and technical measures have been tested to keep hostile users out without hurting friendly coverage. Even so, there is no treaty mechanism that compels a private owner to keep a network alive in a theater if he decides otherwise. If the switch is flipped, the force has to ride out the blackout.

There are also the familiar electronic warfare risks: Russian forces jam GPS and try to interfere with uplinks near the line. Ukrainian crews have learned to lower signatures, mask antennas and move frequently. The constellation has been hardened in software with updates after past attempts to poke holes in it. But it costs power budget, training time, and sometimes raw bandwidth. It also introduces friction with allies who want the same network to remain available to civilian users during crises, to humanitarian corridors or to media. The balance between military priority and open access is difficult to settle.

Starlink is now deeply wired into Western defense planning, not only in Ukraine but across navies and land forces that want a resilient commercial layer on top of government satcom. The United States bought access for Ukraine, Poland financed thousands of terminals and has debated how long it can finance it. European leaders talk about sovereign communications and new constellations, but those plans take time and cost money. Meanwhile, the owner of the dominant network can shape outcomes by extending coverage, shrinking it, or simply changing terms. Allies have already asked what happens if a private decision runs counter to a public strategy.

There are practical ways to reduce the risk without losing the benefits. The first is redundancy: layer Starlink with other commercial satcom providers, HF relays and terrestrial radio chains, even if the user experience is worse. The second is contractual leverage that sets minimum service levels, escalation paths and government override in defined crisis conditions. The third is technical: wider use of mesh networking between units, more off-grid power planning, and pre-planned fallbacks for drone control with lower bandwidth profiles can buy time. Finally, developping accelerated European and allied sovereign constellations so that there is an alternative in a few years.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst, Army Recognition Group.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.