From today’s WSJ 🇺🇦 📡 “Ukrainian officials and officers at headquarters and in the field credit Starlink with keeping their forces connected. ‘Without Starlink, we would have been losing the war already,’ said one platoon commander.
Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said in an interview that Starlink had been critical for communications between commanders and units in places where regular cellphone service is out. ‘Starlink is a very, very good piece of equipment,’ Mr. Reznikov said. ‘It’s not lethal, but it’s really effective.’
Unlike a fiber-optic connection, Starlink’s portable satellite dishes communicate with a constellation of satellites that beam down the internet. The dish then sends out a Wi-Fi signal for nearby devices.
It doesn’t rely on cellphone towers or buried fiber lines, making it more robust in conflict zones. The service’s compact and easy-to-move satellite dishes are also proving well suited for the backup internet needs of a crisis-hit country such as Ukraine.
Apart from its role bolstering Ukraine’s command and control on the battlefield, Starlink has helped officials quickly reconnect liberated towns to the internet. Coverage has allowed soldiers to stay in touch with loved ones. Thousands of Ukrainian troops cut off at a steel mill in the southeastern city of Mariupol used Starlink to send and publish online photos and videos chronicling their plight along with public and private messages to the outside world.
Starlink has become crucial on the battlefield, Ukrainian officers say. At one outpost, north of Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv, the local Ukrainian army commander conferenced in on his iPhone a spotter on the roof of the building, a drone operator and an artillery team several miles away, trying to guide mortar rounds to Russian lines at the forest edge. Starlink enabled the connection.
Major cities on the front line such as Lysychansk and Severodonetsk in Donbas have been left without mobile-phone coverage since April. At the Ukrainian government compound in Lysychansk, Starlink provided the only secure means of communications with military units and civilian authorities. It was also offered to the public, with local residents going to the building to connect with their families in safer parts of Ukraine and to plot evacuations.
It is also helping to boost morale and dissipate boredom. During an artillery attack on their base near Izyum, in the Kharkiv region, in May, soldiers hunkering down in a school basement browsed on their phones and FaceTimed with their spouses on Starlink-enabled connections.”
— https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraine-leans-on-elon-musks-starlink-in-fight-against-russia-11657963804
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