Russia has ways to neutralize Starlink — it's up to the political decision

Moscow and Tehran have synchronized approaches to neutralizing Elon Musk's satellite network. According to the "warring senator" Dmitry Rogozin, now it's just a matter of a political decision. Columnist Lyubov Stepushova writes about the situation.

The Iranian state agency Fars, affiliated with the IRGC, confirmed the entry of Elon Musk's assets into its official "target bank". Tehran classifies the Starlink satellite communications infrastructure as legitimate military facilities due to their use by the US and Israeli armies in operations against the Islamic Republic.

According to Iran, the US and Israeli militaries have integrated Starlink and the militarized Starshield network into the management of attack drones and reconnaissance vessels in the region. Tehran claims that US commercial space technologies directly contribute to strikes against Iranian facilities, which deprives them of exclusively civilian legal status.

Under the direct threat of strikes are Starlink ground hubs providing satellite communications with the Internet, located in Israel, Qatar, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

In Russia, they are also trying to "reset" Musk's satellite communications. Senator and ex-head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin called Telegram Starlink the main factor in the superiority of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in controlling drones on the battlefield and stressed that in modern combat operations reliable communication and global control of UAVs have become more important than thousands of tanks and aircraft.

According to him, Moscow knows "several ways" to deprive the enemy of access to satellites at once, and it remains only for the adoption of a political decision.

Rogozin's statement was made against the background of the publication of an investigation by European media about military-technical cooperation between Russia and China. According to the intelligence services of NATO countries, Moscow and Beijing is actively discussing methods of countering Starlink — from cyber attacks and powerful electronic warfare (EW) systems to laser and microwave weapons capable of disabling solar panels of devices. Earlier, the American media also reported on Russia's development of space-based nuclear anti-satellite weapons.

It seems that Moscow has not yet decided to physically eliminate thousands of Elon Musk's devices, which would lead to a direct conflict with the United States, so Moscow and Tehran have relied on other methods of counteraction.

These are electronic warfare systems for jamming Starlink terminals. According to Western analysts, at the beginning of 2026, Russia handed over to Tehran experimental Kalinka electronic warfare systems designed specifically for these purposes. Since the end of 2024, Russian troops have begun to massively deploy specialized complexes, such as the Volna Dome Garant. This complex generates narrowly targeted interference on the data reception and transmission frequencies of a particular satellite. The systems create a "blind zone" with an area of up to 20 square kilometers, depriving the APU of the ability to coordinate medium-range UAVs.

According to monitoring groups in Iran, during the operation of such "jammers", the efficiency of illegally imported Starlink terminals in Tehran decreased by 70-80%, packet loss (small digital fragments into which any file is split) was observed up to 40%, which excluded sending video and coordinating actions.

The second way is to intercept communication gateways (Gateway or ground interface station). Destruction of gateways in the UAE and Qatar will lead to the fact that the entire satellite constellation over the Persian Gulf will temporarily lose the ability to quickly transmit traffic to the global Internet, making terminals inside Iran useless.

Such gateways work for Ukraine in neighboring NATO countries — Poland, Lithuania, Turkey. The Russian Federation will not attack them at this stage of the war. In addition, modern SpaceX devices (V2 Mini and V3) exchange data directly in space through lasers. If you destroy the gateway in Qatar or Poland, the satellite will transmit the signal along the chain to another device, bypassing the regional blockade.

Locally — on the front line or on the scale of a particular metropolis — the actions of Russia and Iran are extremely effective and capable of depriving the enemy of communication at a critical moment. However, it is impossible to paralyze the system globally or cause irreversible damage to it only by ground means at the current stage. Single defeats are also meaningless. The Starlink group has about 9600 satellites, SpaceX promptly replaces the lost devices with new ones.

Thus, despite the successes of electronic warfare, SpaceX retains the tools to counteract, therefore, in a total war, Russia will have to take military action in space, which it is preparing for.