China is helpping Russia accelerate the deployment of its answer to the satellite communications system, the Rassvet satellite internet network, that will be available for military use as early as 2027, Ukrainian officials and researchers warn, as Kyiv presses Washington for sanctions.
As IntelliNews reported, the East-West conflict is increasingly driving military tech cooperation between the members of the informal CRINK alliance (China, Russia, Iran and North Korea), which are not just sharing their battle-hardened innovations, but are in the process of building a wartime innovation network between four of the most militarised countries in the world, to try and keep ahead of Western weapons system in the unfolding asymmetrical war, where cheap, mass produced low-tech solutions have become key.
And while Moscow has the missiles and materials, China has the electronics and satellite components that Russia misses. Beijing has already rolled out its BeiDou satellite navigation system which has been adopted by Iran that has improved accuracy and allowed Tehran’s drones to flummox Israeli electronic countermeasures that were so effective in the previous clash in 2025.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the Financial Times in an interview published on October 3 that Beijing was helping Moscow build its own version of SpaceX's Starlink.
"We know that China works on satellites, works on the possibility of helping Russia with a similar Starlink," he said, adding that Rassvet could be operating by the end of this year or early in 2027. He said he had asked US President Donald Trump several times, most recently in New York in September, to sanction the Russian and Chinese companies involved to cut off component supplies at source without effect.
Russian forces have lost their illicit access to Starlink terminals, and a constellation of their own would let drones, maritime drones, vehicles and command posts stay connected beyond the range of ground radio, stream video in real time and take new targets after launch. Ukraine's own forces have relied on Starlink for exactly that since 2022.
"If these entities are not sanctioned, it will actually make this program possible for Russia and that will be a game-changer," Denys Sienik, deputy chief of mission at Ukraine's embassy in Washington, told reporters on October 1, Reuters reported. He said a Rassvet network running by the end of 2026 would let Russia hit targets on Ukrainian territory in real time.
Anton Gerashchenko, a former adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, set out the case in a post on X on October 6, arguing that 2027 would be the most dangerous period, when Russia could move from experiments to systematic military use of satellite communications. He warned that the threat extends to Europe, where a drone could be flown against factories, airfields, ports or energy sites by an operator sitting in Russia to devastating effect. Europe’s air defence system is underdeveloped and currently unable to repel massed Russian drone swarms. There is talk of building a drone wall on Europe’s eastern border, but these plans remain only as blue prints.
Rassvet is being built by Moscow-based Bureau 1440, part of IT group IKS Holding, for an orbit of about 800 km, with laser links between satellites and 5G NTN equipment. The first 16 production satellites went up from Plesetsk on March 23. A second batch followed on July 19, but none of those satellites had reached its planned altitude by the end of August and one from the first batch had already deorbited. Bureau 1440 said in September it had begun work on a new generation of spacecraft, presumably with Chinese help. Russia plans more than 900 low-orbit satellites by 2035.
An investigation by Ukraine's Centre for Defence Reforms, reported by RBC-Ukraine in August, found that Bureau 1440 paid about $1.42mn in 2025, almost all of it in yuan, to Russian company Materik, which imported SMA-D-6 attitude-control reaction wheels made by Shanghai Modern Aerotech. Their specifications closely match the VRW-D-6 made by Germany's Vectronic Aerospace, Gerashchenko reports. Some 90 Bureau 1440 staff travelled to China during 2025, almost every month, visiting commercial space centres, satellite makers and satellite internet companies.
Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst at the Saratoga Foundation, argued in May that cooperation with China was the only plausible explanation for how fast Bureau 1440 developed its flat-panel Rassvet Gen1 satellite, pointing to its similarity to the Qianfan, or SpaceSail, satellites built by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology.
"If the entire supply chain of Rassvet Gen1 satellites were delivered from China, Russia could lose the last remnants of its strategic autonomy in space affairs," he wrote.
In January 2023 the then head of Roscosmos, Yury Borisov, said Russia had agreed to buy electronic components for rocket and space technology from China after Western supplies dried up, calling Russian electronics the industry's "Achilles' heel".
Gerashchenko argued that China could shorten Russia's wait further by giving it terminals and access to Qianfan itself, whose orbits cover Russian territory, before Rassvet is complete. China has already been accused of giving Iran high resolution satellite intelligence for its strikes against US military bases in the opening phase of Operation Epic Fury to devastating effect. Those bases were largely destroyed beyond repair in a matter of days.
Russia has launched about 32 serial satellites, but the constellation's coverage remains patchy, and mass production of compact terminals has not been confirmed. RBC-Ukraine reported that mass production was planned only for 2030. Ukraine's military intelligence chief Oleh Ivashchenko said in September that the satellites' "effectiveness is low". Kyiv's lobbying for sanctions is aimed at keeping it that way.
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