Ray Furlong
Earlier this month, air defense units in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv were unusually busy during an overnight bombardment by Russian missiles and drones. Some 700 kilometers above them, Chinese spy satellites were silently passing by, according to Ukrainian intelligence.
The Kremlin has denied that China was providing it with battlefield information, saying it has its own satellites. But experts suggest that, in fact, Russia has a dire need for Chinese assistance.
“Russia’s infrastructure is pretty old and creaky,” said Clayton Swope, who spent 14 years in the CIA, mostly in its Directorate of Science and Technology.
“It really seems like a no-brainer that if China is willing to offer either something from a company or from its own government capabilities, Russia will take advantage of that,” Swope, now at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told RFE/RL.
China’s Spy-Sat Capabilities
Given the classified nature of such information, it’s hard to say exactly how many spy satellites any nation has.
A report published by the US Defense Intelligence Agency in 2022, Challenges to Security in Space, estimated that China had 262 satellites for ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) compared to Russia’s 32.
“Russia actually started buying commercial satellite imagery on the free commercial market from April 2022,” Juliana Suess, from the German Institute of International and Security Affairs (SWP), told RFE/RL.
“That sort of shows us that Russia realized that actually this is something that they would need. And it also shows that their own sovereign capabilities were simply not enough to plug that gap.”
There is also a quality gap, largely caused by Russia’s ageing satellite fleet. Some of it dates from Soviet times but there have also been more recent launches, including since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, over 2022-24.
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