Long-Range Ukrainian Air Strike Cripples Russian Alternative to Elon Musk’s Starlink System

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is hailing a pinpoint strike on a factory deep inside Russia, disrupting Moscow’s development of its version of the Starlink satellite communications network that has become the eyes and ears of Ukraine’s highly successful military drone campaign. Independent analysts and Russian media reports are confirming that one of Kyiv’s homemade “Flamingo” cruise missiles hit the so-called “cleanroom” at Russia’s Progress Space Rocket Centre, where workers assemble sensitive instrumentation and printed circuit boards for the rockets used to launch the nation’s satellites.The strike on Saturday also demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to evade improved Russian air defenses as the missile flew some 560 miles over hostile territory to reach its target in the Samara region near Kazakhstan. A second missile hit an airfield used for strikes on Ukrainian cities about 435 miles from Ukraine, while a third hit a critical oil facility at Ust-Luga, 500 miles from Ukraine on the Baltic Sea, Mr. Zelensky said.“Today there are new significant results from our long-range strikes,” Mr. Zelensky wrote Saturday on his Telegram channel before detailing the three targets. “Our plan of long-range sanctions against Russia for this war is being executed, and it is important that Russia’s war potential decreases. Peace is needed, and in Russia, this must be visible – through concrete damage to concrete facilities. Glory to Ukraine!”The governor and mayor of Samara, more than 500 miles southeast of Moscow, were quoted Saturday by Azerbaijan’s APA news site confirming that an unidentified industrial site in the region had been hit. APA also cited open-source intelligence analysts from the Astra and Exilenova+ Telegram channels saying the Ukrainian missile had hit an industrial zone shared by the Progress Space Rocket Centre.A Ukrainian open-source intelligence group, CyberBoroshno, said the strike “likely struck building 106A” at the Rocket Centre “which is part of the Soyuz launch vehicle production array.” It described the building as the site where electronics comprising the “nervous system” of Russia’s Soyuz-2 rockets are electroplated and assembled. “Without this stage, the rocket cannot be assembled, even if the fuselage and tanks are ready,” the group said.The plant is identified as Russia’s only production site for its Soyuz-2 space vehicles, which are used to launch military reconnaissance satellites and a still-developing low-Earth-orbit satellite network akin to Elon Musk’s Starlink system.Mr. Musk has denied Russia’s military the use of the Starlink network, which Ukraine relies on for battlefield command and control, artillery targeting, and piloting of its increasingly effective long-range attack drones.Moscow is rushing to develop its own Rassvet network but so far has only an estimated 38 satellites in orbit compared to Starlink’s more than 10,000. “The constellation remains far too small for continuous coverage and currently offers only limited communication windows,” the Times of India reported this month.The newspaper says Russia aims to expand the network to about 300 satellites and eventually as many as 900, but those plans are likely to have been set back by Saturday’s attack.The latest air strikes are also notable because they suggest Ukraine has found ways to evade Russian air defenses, which had previously been highly effective against Kyiv’s Flamingo cruise missiles, introduced to combat in August 2025. Russian defense media recently claimed that the country has successfully used high-altitude radar assets to intercept the missiles.Analysts suggest that Ukraine achieved its latest successes by modifying the missiles to fly at extremely low altitudes — as low as 50 feet — where they are invisible to the high-altitude radar, and by simultaneously launching hundreds of fixed-wing drones to overwhelm the Russian defenses.

Long-Range Ukrainian Air Strike Cripples Russian Alternative to Elon Musk’s Starlink System

Long-Range Ukrainian Air Strike Cripples Russian Alternative to Elon Musk’s Starlink System

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