European countries and private firms can preserve Ukraine’s access to space intelligence.
By David Axe
March 5, 2025
Forbes
Cynically and bizarrely demanding Ukraine end a war it did not start, the United States ended a longstanding intelligence-sharing arrangement with Ukraine this week.
The intel schism is part of the fallout from a shocking Friday press conference in the Oval Office, during which U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for not thanking them often enough for past U.S. aid pledged by the previous administration.
The split could hinder Ukrainian efforts to defend civilians from Russian missile raids and strike distant Russian targets. But it won’t halt those efforts. And in isolating Ukraine from lifesaving intel, the U.S. also isolates itself. Especially in space.
Initially lacking a large fleet of military satellites and the money to rent equivalent commercial satellites, Ukraine relied heavily on America’s own large fleet of spacecraft—hundreds of satellites for communication and surveillance—plus commercial space services paid for by the U.S. or other allies.
The satellites helped Ukrainian troops, drones and munitions navigate and communicate, spot via radar and camera Russian forces on the move, and trace Russian command networks by detecting their radios. “Ukraine has been able to leverage space systems far beyond expectations based on its capabilities prior to February 2022,” Robin Dickey and Michael Gleason noted in Aether, a trade journal.
But much of that leverage disappeared this week amid the Trump administration’s shocking lurch toward de facto alignment with Russian interests. “It’s pretty bad,” a source familiar with U.S.-Ukrainian intel sharing told CNN. “Combined with the stopping of military assistance and foreign aid, it pretty much guarantees a Russian victory without there needing to be a peace deal.”
That’s not true. Ukraine’s loyal European allies possess many of the same space capabilities as the U.S., albeit on a much smaller scale. And commercial providers possess others. Recall that Ukraine, which has occasionally built and launched its own spacecraft, leased—for $17 million—a radar surveillance satellite from Finnish firm Iceye back in 2022.
Two years later, Germany paid for German firm Rheinmetall and Iceye to expand Ukraine’s space surveillance capabilities. Meanwhile, The Netherlands paid Colorado space company
Maxar, whose satellites frequently photograph virtually the entire surface of Earth, $13 million for access to imagery.
The Dutch share intel with the Ukrainians under the terms of a 2024 memo. The Ukrainians can also count on space surveillance data from Europe’s biggest space powers: the United Kingdom, Italy and France.
Poland pays Starlink, the space communications firm partly owned by Trump ally Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to provide Ukraine with vital services. The Polish government reaffirmed its commitment to the arrangement last month amid reports Musk might block Ukrainian access to the space comms. But Ukraine’s European allies aren’t taking chances. Eutelsat, a Franco-British space comms firm, is in talks with the European Union to provide services to Ukraine.
The U.S. can seriously complicate Ukraine’s access to space, but it can’t end it. And in blocking intel sharing, the Trump administration may end up harming the U.S. as much as it harms Ukraine. After all, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies don’t generate all their own intel. They too benefit from sharing—especially via their “Five Eyes” alliance with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
But Five Eyes could disintegrate under Trump. Amid Trump’s escalating trade war with Canada and his strange obsession with compelling Canada to join the United States as the 51st state, Trump advisor Peter Navarro has called for the U.S. to eject Canada from Five Eyes—a move that would harm all five members of the alliance.
Trump’s weaponization of longstanding U.S. intel sharing, vis-à-vis Ukraine, could accelerate Five Eyes’ collapse.
David Axe – Forbes Staff. Aerospace & Defense. He is a journalist, author and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. Axe founded the website War Is Boring in 2007 as a webcomic, and later developed it into a news blog. He enrolled at Furman University and earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 2000. Then he went to the University of Virginia to study medieval history before transferring to and graduating from the University of South Carolina with a master’s degree in fiction in 2004.