By Andrew Stuttaford
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Humanity’s ability to exploit space, especially (for now)
in near-Earth orbit, is rapidly increasing. And where one country gains an
advantage, there will be others looking to neutralize that lead.
Under the circumstances, a report by Mirek Toda for EUobserver is worth
noting. He relates that according to research from The Insider, a
well-thought-of, Latvia-based investigative website, China and Russia are
working on a joint plan to “kill” Starlink. It’s not really a surprise, but
still . . .
But first, some background.
The Insider,
together with Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, has obtained a cache of
documents containing previously undisclosed details about the growing military
cooperation between Russia and China.
The documents date from 2023, and, along with much else,
they make a nonsense of China’s claims to be some sort of neutral in the
Russo-Ukrainian war, claims that few ought to believe anyway. The length of the
war, and the impact of sanctions on Russia, has worked very well for China, forcing Moscow into a position of dependency on
Beijing.
Given China’s long-term geopolitical ambitions, securing
a huge, resource-rich quasi-vassal is a valuable prize. And for the much longer
term, China has some territorial issues in Russia’s far east, which Beijing
still regards as unsettled business. Additionally, while China will dislike the
way that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is triggering the rearmament of NATO,
it won’t be too sad to see that Western support for Ukraine is coming at a
considerable cost in money, matériel, and distraction.
Russia can also offer China something else: battlefield
experience.
The Insider:
A presentation by
Li Rong of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences proposes formalizing that trade
around loitering munitions [suicide drones]. China fields 160 types from more
than fifty manufacturers, yet it has almost no real combat experience with any
of them. Russia, however, has extensive battlefield data. The proposal calls
for Russia to share what it has learned at the front while China contributes AI
and mass-production capacity as the two powers jointly develop the next
generation of autonomous “swarm” munitions. The results are already visible in
Ukraine. According to Ukrainian military-intelligence documents from 2025, the
V2U autonomous drone now used by Russian forces runs on Chinese AI modules,
Chinese lidar sensors, Chinese batteries, and Chinese solid-state drives. As
the Guangzhou participants discussed, Chinese engineering is, in effect, being
combat-tested in Ukraine.
As for Starlink, perhaps the most interesting aspect of
schemes to disable or weaken it is that they envisage not only cyber and
physical attacks, but also using international or transnational regulatory
structures to China and Russia’s advantage:
Starlink’s
satellite density sharply raises the risk of collisions in low orbit, the
authors argue, and so Moscow and Beijing should build an international
coalition to win regulatory limits on the constellation’s expansion.
And:
China and Russia
would jointly file for critical frequency bands and orbital slots, using their
weight in international regulatory bodies to obstruct the future deployment of
Musk’s company.
Beijing and Moscow’s belief that such bodies’ rulemaking
powers can be used to serve their interests (see how well Beijing plays the
climate game to weaken the West) is a reminder that the U.S. should carefully
consider the extent to which its interests in space are subject to
international control.
Not completely unrelatedly, there’s this (via Bloomberg, July 16):
Earlier this week,
Google DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis unveiled a proposal for
a new international watchdog that would do “rigorous” tests and reviews of
cutting-edge AI models before release.
There are plenty of reasons why that is a terrible idea.
One of them is the advantage it would hand Beijing, which has no interest in
playing by rules imposed on others.
Oh, yes (via Bloomberg, also on July 16):
President Xi
Jinping used the rise of China’s AI models to stake his claim on shaping the
technology’s global rules, even as their growing power stirs security concerns
in Washington and Beijing alike.
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