The Russian Rassvet project is moving, but it moves like a man with two broken legs trying to sprint. Twenty functional satellites in orbit after six years of effort, a production chain spread across 1300 suppliers, and a launch cadence that tops out at six or seven Soyuz-2.1b flights per year in the most generous Kremlin fantasy. It is a constellation, a PowerPoint slide with occasional hardware attached.
The Fragile Production Chain
The latest batch could not even reach stable altitude. Several birds stuck below 360 km are already bleeding speed to atmospheric drag and will deorbit before they become useful. Meanwhile, the single factory that builds the only rocket capable of batching these things just ate Ukrainian cruise missiles in August. Progress in Samara is the literal bottleneck. Burn that line hard enough and the entire schedule collapses into years of single-digit launches, while other military payloads keep competing for the same scarce rockets.
Even if Moscow diverts every single Soyuz to Rassvet and magically protects the factory, basic coverage over Ukraine still demands at least 300 satellites. That means another seventeen successful batch launches from a country whose space industry is cannibalizing itself for the war. Real-world constraints, sanctions bite, and competing priorities point to two to four batch launches per year at best. Translate that into calendar time and you are looking at 2028-2031 before they can guarantee the persistent connectivity needed for deep autonomous drone control across the entire operational area.
The Threat Timeline
That timeline is still dangerous. Every successful launch tightens the mesh. By early 2028, we can expect usable communication pockets that let Russian operators run fiber-free FPV and Lancet missions without Starlink. Their own anti-Starlink jammers like Volna, Kupol, and Garant already exist. Pair those with even partial Rassvet coverage, and the frontline connectivity problem they have suffered since the Starlink cutoff starts to ease. That directly threatens the operational tempo advantage Ukraine has built since Moscow lost reliable satellite comms.
Moscovia does not get a clean sovereign Starlink because it chose imperial war over competent engineering.
Countermeasures and the Path Forward
Hoping their program fails is not the answer. The answer is to make it fail faster and to prepare countermeasures now. Ukraine is already developing responses. European IRIS2 is coming online around the same window and should be integrated with Ukrainian systems from day one. The same logic that turned Starlink denial into a battlefield multiplier must be applied preemptively to Rassvet:
- Strike the launch cadence at the factory.
- Strike the command nodes on the ground.
- Develop directed-energy and cyber tools that make those satellites expensive paperweights the moment they matter.
Every delay we impose, every satellite we blind or deorbit, every launch vehicle we turn into expensive scrap is another month bought for Ukrainian soldiers. Starting a war against a serious neighbor eventually turns your entire technological base into a legitimate target. The project is slow, fragile, and late. Our job is to keep it that way until the regime that ordered it no longer exists to watch it fail.
