February 15, 2026
The Russians are looking for alternatives to Starlink, but right now, it is impossible to replace them with some simple stand-in
This opinion was expressed by aviation expert Konstantin Kryvolap on the air of Espresso.
“I don’t quite understand what they did there. At first, there was talk about balloons, about hot air balloons. When they talked about hot air balloons, I thought they were tethered balloons – that’s clear to me. When we had, say, the Kursk operation, we suppressed the Russians’ communications with the help of such balloons, and they also worked as repeaters, which helped us to communicate with our troops. The fact that it is impossible to replace Starlink with some simple solution is now clear, because in terms of bandwidth, in terms of communication quality, Starlink has overtaken the entire planet during the past five years,” he said.
Konstantin Kryvolap noted that, currently, no one is able to make, launch, and provide as many satellites as SpaceX does.
“Neither the Europeans, nor the Americans, Amazon or anyone else, they are not able to make, launch and provide the 9,400 Starlink satellites that Musk, SpaceX, now has. Therefore, when they talk about tethered balloons, then, well, this is really not analog communication, which the Russians were forced to return to at some point, but it is an inferior replacement. And they will not achieve the quality of communication that they had with Starlink. There will be some kind of communication, they had some communication systems there before, they even listed what these systems are, what they do, but they are all worse in terms of their performance than Starlink,” he believes.
The question that should be asked, is why Musk allowed the russians to use this for 4 years.
Keep in mind that both ruSSia and Ukraine use Starlink. Just shutting it off would have hurt the defenders as well.
Maybe nobody thought of white-listing Ukrain’s Starlink terminals until Mykhailo Fedorov was appointed Defence Minister?