A Suspicious Pattern Alarming the Ukrainian Military
A Ukrainian military source believes that Russia’s long-range strikes are aimed using satellite imagery provided by U.S. companies.
Originally published March 18, 2024. (This “shines some light on the decisions of commercial companies to withdraw cooperation from Ukraine this week” ~ Anne Applebaum)
Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky got unusually testy over the failure of the United States to deliver anti-missile and anti-drone systems. On March 2, a strike in Odesa had killed 12 people, five of them children. “The world has enough missile-defense systems,” he said. Debates over funding have kept those systems from being delivered. “Delaying the supply of weapons to Ukraine, missile-defense systems to protect our people, leads, unfortunately, to such losses.”
Others in Ukraine’s government, however, have expressed an even deeper frustration. What if Americans, in addition to not sending defensive assistance to Ukraine, are sending offensive assistance to Russia? A Ukrainian military source told me he believes that Russia’s long-range strikes, by cruise missiles that are among the most costly weapons in its nonnuclear arsenal, are aimed using satellite imagery provided by U.S. companies. He says the sequence is clear: A satellite snaps pictures of a site, then some days or weeks later a missile lands. Sometimes another satellite is sent to capture additional images afterward, perhaps to check the extent of the damage. “The number of coincidences, where the images are followed by strikes, is too high to be random,” the source told me. (I agreed not to name him because he is not authorized to speak publicly.)
