The war in Ukraine has become, among other things, a fight over signals. Russian forces are now trying to jam Elon Musk’s Starlink network to blunt the cheap long-range drones that have reshaped the conflict, according to Ukrainian drone commanders and pilots who spoke to Reuters.
The tool they describe has a name. Ukrainian crews say Russia is fielding a jammer called the Volna Kupol Garant, which throws out a signal strong enough to destabilise a Starlink connection across roughly 20 square kilometres.
The systems are still fairly scarce. Around 10 have been spotted so far, though a device with that kind of reach does not need to be everywhere to make a difference.
Jamming is a crude weapon, but an effective one. Flood the frequencies a drone uses to send video and take orders, and you can blind the operator or sever the link entirely, dropping the aircraft out of the sky or nudging it off course.
What Russia is trying to knock out is a genuinely new kind of weapon. Ukraine’s so-called mid-strike drones can hit targets dozens of kilometres behind the line, cheaply and with real accuracy, and many of them fly on Starlink.
