The long-predicted first space war has begun: The allies of the free world are winning

Before the Kremlin’s troops and tanks entered Russia’s borders and their missiles began setting fire to Ukrainian cities and cathedrals, their leaders launched a secret mission that they believed could lead to a quick victory in a blitzkrieg.

The notorious Russian military intelligence service carried out a cyber ambush that worked almost perfectly: it attacked the ground stations of an American satellite network that the Ukrainian president and defense ministers relied on to communicate with each other and command their soldiers.

The stealth attack destroyed tens of thousands of Viasat modems in a very short period of time, jeopardizing vital links between Kyiv and its defenders across the country, as well as with allies around the world.

Isolating Ukraine’s top commanders behind a digital Iron Curtain as Russia’s tanks sought to take the capital, firing missiles at television and telecommunications towers, was part of a massive mission to envelop the guardians of the beleaguered democracy in the “fog of war,” says Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability at the Washington-based think tank Secure World Foundation.

The focus of that mission was to destroy Kyiv’s links to the American constellation that provided the president and his Security Council with Internet coverage and the ability to coordinate Ukrainian resistance, Samson, one of the leading U.S. experts on space defense, told me in an interview.

The Russian military’s stark focus on quickly destroying Kyiv’s ability to use cutting-edge space technologies was recently highlighted in a chronicle by her colleagues at the Center for Naval Analyses, she says.

These CNA scientists have thoroughly combed through papers and orders from across the Russian military and reported that “controlling access to space-based information is seen as a tremendous advantage in terms of … improved warfare capability.”

Russia’s top defense strategists also believe it is imperative to destroy the enemy’s space-based ground infrastructure “during the initial phase of the war, as both sides would likely preemptively launch what is called in Russian jargon an ‘information strike’ to disable the enemy’s command and control systems, as well as its communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance,” the CNA experts add in their report, “The Role of Space in Russia’s Operations in Ukraine.”

The paramount importance that Kremlin generals attach to destroying an adversary’s space technologies at the very beginning of a conflict explains Russia’s tightly synchronized invasions of the Viasat network and of Ukrainian territory—both of which were not heavily guarded.

“Russian forces deliberately attacked the Viasat terminals to disrupt Ukrainian military communications as they invaded Ukraine,” Samson told me. “Russia has never officially admitted to being behind the attacks, but the US and its EU partners officially declared this in May 2022.” The British Foreign Secretary accused “Russian military intelligence” of organizing the cyber blitzkrieg and announced that it would face “serious consequences.”

In Moscow, the Kremlin’s jubilant cries that Kyiv’s leadership had been trapped in an information black hole while its tank battle group slowly approached the capital were abruptly cut off.

In an operation similar to the Berlin Airlift, Elon Musk began building tens of thousands of Starlink stations in Ukraine, reconnecting the country to the World Wide Web via its broadband satellites orbiting the globe.

Maxar Technologies and Planet Labs, developers of cutting-edge imaging satellites, began flooding the Ukrainian presidential palace and the world’s leading newsrooms with high-resolution panoramic photos – taken from space – showing the line of Russian tanks stuck outside Kyiv, the mass graves appearing in Russian-occupied villages, and the cities in shock bombarded by Moscow’s missiles.

The Russians were angry.

Vladimir Putin began sending envoys to UN meetings to threaten that his space forces might begin shooting down American satellites helping Ukraine.

But by then the Russian leadership must have realized the hopelessness of this goal, says Samson.

While the Soviet Union once competed with its arch-enemy America to put sophisticated missile-tracking satellites into orbit, Russia under Putin – where massive official corruption stretches from the Kremlin to the cosmodromes – now has fewer than 200 satellites. By comparison, SpaceX alone has put more than 6,000 satellites into space.

At the same time, Russia lags far behind the United States, other NATO countries and even Ukraine when it comes to integrating space technology into its military operations, says James Clay Moltz, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

“They did not prepare for a prolonged conflict with an adversary that had access to more aerial intelligence than they did,” Professor Moltz told me in an interview. “The Russian military still appears to face an intelligence gap due to limited constellations and lack of access to Western commercial imagery.”

Despite the successful attack on Viasat’s ground terminals, he says, Russia failed to achieve its main goal – to deny the Ukrainian military access to information obtained from space.

“Russia obviously did not count on Ukraine’s cooperation with Western countries and with commercial services to which Russia has no access,” says Professor Moltz, who has written a number of compelling books on the competition between the world’s major space powers, including “Asia’s Space Race” and “The Politics of Space Security.”

While Putin issued a barrage of threats to attack Western satellites coming to Ukraine’s aid – likely targeting SpaceX, Planet, and Maxar – the inner circle of defense ministers likely concluded that “destroying one or two Western satellites with the ASAT weapon tested in November 2021” would do virtually nothing to reverse Russia’s vast lag behind American space power.

Instead of aiming its rockets at SpaceX spacecraft, Moscow has instead fired them at Starlink stations scattered across Ukraine and at Dnipro, the space center long dubbed Ukraine’s “rocket city.”

Professor Moltz says that Dnipro has been attacked by Russian missiles over the past two years, with the Yuzhmash spacecraft facility apparently being directly targeted.

In a prescient article titled “First Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine War as a Space Conflict,” Naval War College Professor David Burbach explains: “The Russia-Ukraine War may be the first two-sided space war” in human history.

Professor Moltz agrees: “Yes, this is the first two-sided space war, and Ukraine is ahead thanks to its partners.”

This first space war, he predicts, could be a precursor to the technologically advanced space conflicts of the superpowers in the future.

If these predicted celestial conflicts result in major missile battles, low Earth orbit could become uninhabitable for human explorers, he adds.

But that is exactly the future that some of Russia’s leading space commissioners foresee.

The co-authors of the CNA Space Chronicle quote Colonel-General VB Zarudnitsky, head of the Russian military’s General Staff Academy, as predicting that in the future there will be “new forms of warfare in space, in particular anti-satellite combat, systematic military operations to destroy state infrastructure facilities, orbital satellite combat (and) anti-space operations.”