Russia tries to jam Starlink to counter Ukraine’s long-range drones

The war in Ukraine has become, among other things, a fight over signals. Russian forces are now trying to jam Elon Musk’s Starlink network to blunt the cheap long-range drones that have reshaped the conflict, according to Ukrainian drone commanders and pilots who spoke to Reuters.

The tool they describe has a name. Ukrainian crews say Russia is fielding a jammer called the Volna Kupol Garant, which throws out a signal strong enough to destabilise a Starlink connection across roughly 20 square kilometres.

The systems are still fairly scarce. Around 10 have been spotted so far, though a device with that kind of reach does not need to be everywhere to make a difference.

Jamming is a crude weapon, but an effective one. Flood the frequencies a drone uses to send video and take orders, and you can blind the operator or sever the link entirely, dropping the aircraft out of the sky or nudging it off course.

What Russia is trying to knock out is a genuinely new kind of weapon. Ukraine’s so-called mid-strike drones can hit targets dozens of kilometres behind the line, cheaply and with real accuracy, and many of them fly on Starlink.

That dependence is also the weak point. Leaning on a single American network has left Ukraine exposed to exactly this kind of interference, and it has fed interest in alternatives that Musk cannot switch off.

The reach of those drones has quietly changed the war. Being able to strike deep into occupied territory with a low-cost aircraft has let Ukraine go after supply dumps and command posts that once sat safely out of range.

Jamming is not the only tactic in play. The same crews say Russia has taken to camouflaging cargoes to make them harder to spot from above, pairing the electronic warfare with old-fashioned concealment.

Electronic warfare has long been one of Russia’s stronger suits, and this is a rare case where the sums favour the defender. Answering a drone that costs a few hundred dollars with a dedicated jammer is, for once, a trade worth making.

The jammers have become prizes in their own right. Ukraine’s 422nd regiment has helped destroy two of them, one struck within hours of being found, in a joint operation with the SBU security service.

Musk’s own control hangs over all of it. He has cut Russian forces off from Starlink to stop Moscow turning the network on Ukraine, a reminder that the switch sits with a private company rather than a government.

Jamming, naturally, invites counter-jamming. As Russia degrades the signals Ukrainian drones rely on, Ukrainian firms have been building navigation that does not need GPS so their aircraft can keep flying through the interference.

Starlink’s place in modern war now stretches well past Ukraine. It has been folded into US operations too, with SpaceX asking the Pentagon to pay far more for terminals tied to the fighting around Iran.

Underneath it all runs the same shift towards unmanned warfare. Cheap drones hooked up to commercial connectivity have turned small, mobile units into a threat that expensive conventional kit struggles to answer.

Ukraine has built a whole industry on that imbalance. Companies such as UFORCE have turned battlefield robotics into real businesses as unmanned systems take on more of the actual fighting.

These accounts come with the usual wartime caveats. They rest on Ukrainian military sources relayed by Reuters, and the specifics, the jamming ranges and the strike counts, are hard to verify from outside the front.

What is not in doubt is the direction of travel. Both sides are now fighting partly over the invisible layer of signals that keeps the drones aloft, and Starlink has become one of the most contested pieces of ground on it.