Russia’s Starlink rival gains steady coverage over Ukraine

A Russian satellite network built to rival Starlink has quietly reached a threshold Ukrainian defense officials have been dreading, providing at least two reliable windows of connectivity over Ukrainian territory every single day, each lasting more than an hour, Militarnyi reported, citing satellite communications expert Volodymyr Stepanets.

The system, called Rassvet, is being built by Bureau 1440, a Russian aerospace company founded in 2020 as an internal research office within the telecom giant MegaFon before spinning off into its own venture under IKS Holding. Bureau 1440 launched the first operational batch of 16 Rassvet satellites on March 23, 2026, aboard a rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome, a Russian military space launch facility roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles) south of Arkhangelsk that also serves as a key site for testing Russia’s land-based nuclear missiles. As of July 31, 2026, that first batch had largely completed deployment into its operational orbital formation, with 12 of the 16 satellites reaching their intended altitude of 550 kilometers (342 miles), three still climbing gradually, and one lost, likely due to a manufacturing defect.

Stepanets described the resulting coverage pattern in detail, explaining that the satellites now form a chain capable of providing strong coverage roughly twice a day, though the actual number of passes over any given region occurs more frequently, spaced at intervals of about ninety minutes.

“We can see that a chain has effectively already formed with good coverage, which creates that kind of good coverage roughly twice a day, but in reality there are more of these passes, meaning several such chains can fly over with coverage of various regions at intervals of approximately once every hour and a half. But what’s important is that these satellites already provide fairly dense coverage,” Stepanets said, according to Militarnyi.

Predicted pass times for the Rassvet 3–8 satellites within Kyiv’s visibility zone. Infographic by N2YO and by Militarnyi.

Satellite tracking data reviewed by Militarnyi indicates the constellation currently passes within visibility range over Ukraine four times a day, though only two or three of those four passes bring the satellites high enough above the horizon to maintain a stable connection with ground terminals. Each usable pass, lasting roughly an hour to ninety minutes for the full constellation, creates what Ukrainian analysts describe as a communications window, a period during which Russian forces could theoretically use satellite terminals to control naval drones and heavy strike and reconnaissance drones built on the Geran-2, Geran-3, and Geran-4 platforms, Russia’s domestically produced variants of Iran’s Shahed loitering munition.

Bureau 1440’s subscriber terminals measure up to 60 centimeters (23.6 in) in both length and width, weigh less than 15 kilograms (33 lb), and offer bandwidth capacity of up to 1 gigabit per second, engineered to operate across a temperature range of minus 40 to positive 40 degrees Celsius (minus 40 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit) suited to Russia’s harsh climate. Like Starlink’s terminals, the Russian devices rely on active phased array antenna technology, letting a terminal automatically locate a satellite, establish a connection, and maintain the link without any mechanical antenna steering. Open-source reporting indicates Bureau 1440 has already finished developing the terminal’s baseline version and is preparing to begin serial production, a step that would likely put these terminals into Russian military hands relatively quickly once manufacturing scales up, potentially extending beyond ground vehicles and command posts to strike and reconnaissance drones and systems that guide cruise missiles and glide bombs.

Russia launched a second batch of 16 Rassvet-3 satellites on July 19, 2026, again from Plesetsk, following a deliberate information campaign designed to obscure the exact launch date. Starting July 10, Russian authorities issued a series of vague, repeatedly revised aviation and maritime warning notices covering the areas where spent rocket stages and fairings would fall, deliberately structured to prevent outside observers from determining the precise date, launch vehicle type, trajectory, or payload for roughly two weeks before the launch finally proceeded. Neither Russia’s Defense Ministry nor Roscosmos publicly confirmed the launch until after Bureau 1440 itself announced the satellites had successfully deployed and been brought under operational control, even as American space-tracking systems had already detected and classified the new satellites independently.

Dutch researcher Bart Hendrickx, who closely tracks Russia’s military space program, linked that unusual secrecy directly to a pattern of Ukrainian drone activity near Plesetsk that began in December 2025.

“Don’t forget that Ukrainian drone attacks on Plesetsk didn’t begin until December last year with the launch of Obzor-R, so this is a relatively new threat. Since another drone attack on Plesetsk took place on the day of the first Rassvet-3 launch in March, Russia appears to have done everything it could to sow confusion over the launch date of the second batch,” Hendrickx said.

Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov told Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukrainian forces attempted a drone strike against Plesetsk during the March launch of the first Rassvet-3 batch, describing serious attempted incursions against the cosmodrome that day.

“Our friends in quotation marks did everything to prevent this launch from happening. We had attempts of serious approaches toward the cosmodrome that day, but nevertheless the joint combat crews of Roscosmos and the Space Forces carried out the assigned task,” Bakanov said.

Officially, Bureau 1440 has stated commercial Rassvet operations will begin in 2027, with previously disclosed Russian plans targeting 250 satellites by 2027, 730 by 2030, and eventually more than 900 by 2035. Reaching that trajectory would require launching new batches at a pace of roughly 16 satellites every month, a rate the company has not come close to matching, since the interval between the first and second batches stretched to nearly four months. Even maintaining that slower four-month cadence, however, would let Russia launch a fourth batch of satellites by March 2027 and achieve round-the-clock coverage over Ukraine by mid-summer of that year, a milestone Ukrainian defense officials would need to counter with effective jamming or other measures well before it arrives.

Russian Rassvet satellite communications terminal. Source: Bureau 1440.

That timeline leaves Ukraine’s military with a narrowing window of its own, one measured not in daily satellite passes but in the months remaining before a constellation still missing most of its planned satellites finishes closing the gaps in its coverage entirely.