Russian Shahed drones using Starlink

Thursday 29 January 2026

Russia’s Shahed drones were never merely a cheap nuisance. From the outset it was a political weapon as much as a military one: a low-cost aircraft designed to be launched in great numbers, to exhaust air defences, to harass civilian life and to remind Ukrainians, night after night, that the Kremlin is willing to make terror a routine method of war. What has changed in recent weeks is not the intent, but the method. A cluster of Ukrainian and European reports now suggests that at least some Russian long-range drones are being fitted with Starlink satellite internet equipment, with Ukrainian electronic warfare specialists warning that this could allow closer control of the aircraft and greater resilience against Ukrainian jamming. 

If these reports are borne out, the implications are serious. Starlink is not a “navigation satellite” in the way that GPS, Galileo or GLONASS are navigation satellite systems. It is a broadband communications network: a means of shifting data, quickly, through space. That distinction matters because it clarifies what Russia may be attempting to do. A Shahed does not need Starlink to know where it is in the abstract. It needs either a dependable positioning signal (typically satellite navigation), an internal inertial system that estimates position by motion, or some combination of both. What Starlink can do, however, is give the drone a robust, high-bandwidth link back to an operator or a control cell. That link can be used to update routes, correct errors, transmit live video, and in some configurations to fly the aircraft more actively than a pre-programmed “fire and forget” profile would allow. Reports in recent days have specifically linked the Starlink fit to overcoming Ukrainian electronic warfare measures and enabling more reliable control at distance. 

This points to a technological logic that is both mundane and alarming. Ukraine has invested heavily in electronic warfare that attempts to jam and spoof: to deny drones their satellite navigation cues, to confuse their receivers and to break their communications links. Der Spiegel has described this contest as a cycle of measure and counter-measure, with Ukraine trying to disrupt radio connections and Russia adapting her drones to resist disruption. If Russia can place a satellite internet terminal on a drone, she may be seeking to “step over” parts of the jamming problem. A satellite link can be harder to interfere with locally, particularly if the defender does not know where the terminal will appear, for how long, and on what frequencies and beam patterns it will operate. It does not make the drone invulnerable, but it may make it less predictable.

So what developments could have made “Starlink on Shaheds” practical now, if it was not practical before?

First, miniaturisation and power integration. Early Starlink terminals were conspicuous: relatively bulky dishes with non-trivial power requirements. A long-range loitering munition has tight weight and power budgets, especially once you include warhead, fuel, engine, flight computer and sensors. In the past two years, however, the broader market trend has been towards smaller, flatter, more power-efficient terminals designed for mobility. Even without naming specific consumer products, the direction of travel in satellite internet hardware has been towards portability. That makes it easier to imagine a terminal being physically mounted on an aircraft frame and supplied from a dedicated battery or from the drone’s electrical generation. The basic engineering challenge shifts from “impossible” to “difficult but feasible”.

Secondly, Russia’s drone industrial learning curve. It is now widely reported that Russia has expanded production and diversified variants, adding speed, improved electronics, and in some cases video feeds and remote-control features. Once a manufacturer is already iterating airframes, avionics and payload bays, integrating an additional communications module becomes the sort of task that an organised design bureau can attempt, fail at, and then attempt again until it works.

Thirdly, access through grey markets and third countries. Reports that Starlink terminals have appeared with Russian drones are not entirely new. References to earlier instances appeared in 2024, and recent reporting suggests a scaling-up rather than a one-off anomaly. A terminal does not need to be purchased in Moscow to end up in Russian hands. Any globally sold hardware can move through resellers, intermediaries and second-hand markets, especially when enforcement is inconsistent. This is not an abstract concern. It is the prosaic story of sanctions evasion: not one dramatic smuggling run, but a thousand small transactions that nobody stops.

Fourthly, the tactical shift from navigation to command-and-control resilience. Some reporting frames the issue as “Starlink to navigate”. Technically, what is more plausible is “Starlink to remain controllable”. A drone that can receive updated waypoints mid-flight, change its terminal dive, select a target of opportunity, or simply avoid known air defence zones has a different military value than a drone that blindly follows a pre-loaded route and hopes its satellite navigation is not denied. This aligns with recent mentions of Shahed-type drones being equipped with live feeds and remote-control capability. 

Fifthly, institutionalisation on the Russian side. The Institute for the Study of War and the Critical Threats Project have assessed that Russian forces are increasingly using Starlink systems on certain strike drones to extend range and effectiveness, suggesting this is becoming an organised practice rather than an improvisation. Whether every claim survives technical scrutiny is a separate question, but the pattern in open-source reporting is clear: Ukraine’s defenders are treating the possibility seriously because the battlefield has taught them that yesterday’s improvisation becomes tomorrow’s standard kit.

The moral dimension should not be lost in the engineering discussion. The Shahed campaign has been directed not merely at airfields and ammunition dumps, but at homes, power infrastructure, and the ordinary habit of sleep. That is its purpose: to make civilian life feel contingent, to keep families in basements, to reduce a society’s confidence in tomorrow. When a communications system built for civilian connectivity becomes implicated in that effort, the discomfort is not political theatre. It is an ethical warning.

This is also why the diplomatic reverberations are already audible. Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski has publicly pressed Elon Musk to act, with coverage describing accusations that Starlink is enabling Russian attacks and profiting from war crimes.  Whatever one thinks of the rhetoric, it reflects a real policy dilemma: what responsibilities do commercial satellite operators have when their hardware is used by sanctioned militaries or integrated into weapons that strike civilians?

There are at least three layers to that dilemma.

One is technical control. Satellite operators can, in principle, geofence service, deactivate terminals, and apply account-level restrictions. The boundaries are not always clean, particularly in contested environments where Ukraine herself relies heavily on Starlink for defence communications. A blunt instrument can punish the victim. Past reporting has shown how sensitive front-line operations can be to satellite connectivity decisions. 

The second is supply chain governance. If terminals are reaching Russian units through intermediaries, then the relevant questions are about distribution controls, reseller oversight, and rapid investigation when a terminal is found on a downed weapon. Denying misuse is not enough. The pattern of misuse becomes the story, and in war, patterns kill.

The third is legal and reputational. A private company does not become a neutral humanitarian actor by selling hardware with a good slogan. Nor does it become a war party simply because a device is stolen or resold. The uncomfortable truth is that modern warfare increasingly runs through private infrastructure: satellites, cloud services, commercial imagery, communications networks. The old categories of “civilian” and “military” supply are blurring, and Russia thrives in that blur.

For Ukraine the practical question is what this means for defence. It is not for a newspaper to provide tactical guidance, but the strategic contour is clear enough. If Russia is indeed adding satellite internet links to some drones, Ukraine will need layered responses: better detection, cheaper interceptors, more agile electronic warfare, and faster adaptation cycles. European policy debates are already moving in that direction, discussing cost-effective counter-drone measures at scale because the arithmetic of shooting down cheap drones with expensive missiles is punishing. 

For Europe more broadly, the lesson is that “dual-use” is no longer a legal footnote. It is a battlefield fact. The same terminal that lets a rural clinic upload scans can, if acquired by the wrong hands, be bolted to an aircraft frame and used to refine the aim of an attack. The answer cannot be to halt communications progress. It must be to build serious enforcement and accountability into the commercial systems on which modern life depends.

Russia has always sought to turn the ordinary into the vulnerable. The power station, the railway line, the apartment block, the mobile telephone network. If she is now attempting to turn satellite internet into another layer of her terror apparatus, then the proper response is neither panic nor resignation. It is clarity: about what the technology can and cannot do, about how the hardware is being acquired, and about the responsibilities of companies and governments when civilian infrastructure is repurposed for the killing of civilians.