An unnamed Ukrainian military source told the journalist The Atlantic Graham Wood that in his opinion, Russian cruise missile strikes against Ukraine are directed using satellite imagery provided by American companies. According to the source, the sequence is clear: a satellite takes images of a location, and a missile arrives a few days or weeks later. Sometimes another satellite acquires additional images later, perhaps to check the extent of the damage.
«The number of cases where the image acquisition is accompanied by shocks is too high to be a coincidence», — the source says.
Companies have an archive of ordered photos with dates and coordinates. You can look through tens of thousands of photos of the territory of Ukraine and notice patterns. For example, in the week before April 2, 2022, about a month after Russia’s full-scale invasion began, American companies requested images of a remote airfield near Myrhorod at least nine times. On April 2, missiles hit it. The following week, someone requested images of the airfield again. Satellite imagery also preceded the strikes on Lviv — before March 26, 2022, someone instructed a satellite to inspect an armored vehicle factory that had been hit. At the end of January 2024, someone commissioned a commercial satellite company to take fresh images of Kyiv, just before the city was hit by a rocket attack. According to the journalist, there are hundreds of similar cases.
«Even six months ago, we could not imagine that private companies would sell satellite images of sensitive areas,» said an unnamed Ukrainian military official. It became hard to believe that these coincidences were coincidental. At the same time, the capabilities of Russian satellites are limited, as are those of Ukrainian satellites.
Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Kateryna Chernogorenko confirmed to a journalist that US satellite companies have supported Ukraine. But she also said that experts from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry suspect that Russia buys satellite images through third-party intermediaries who do business with Western satellite companies.