Quote (Goomshill @ 27 Oct 2022 12:29)
There's a lot less granular news coming out of the Ukraine war and this coincides with Russia attacking energy infrastructure. We're probably losing a bunch of on-the-ground reporting from average citizens.
There's basically no new information out of the Ukrainian territories beyond the front lines where Russian sources can report on it, and even when Ukraine said it was aiming for media blackouts we still saw social media posts of details.
How much of the still-populated areas of Ukraine are blacked out right now?
To be fair, Ukraine has so far never gotten the chance to mount a large-scale offensive quite like this. While they were on the defense and needed to garner sympathy in the West, allowing lots of on-the-ground reporting helped their cause by exposing Russian war crimes, keep morale up if they were successful in skirmishes and so on. Now that Russia has the defenders advantage, and now that Ukraine's military will probably have to make hard decisions and cope with civilian casualties as a result of their offense, cracking down on the information flow makes far more sense for them. Also, from what I can tell, we are still getting plenty of reporting from places in Ukraine which are away from the frontline, like Kyiv or Dnipro.
Quote (Goomshill @ 27 Oct 2022 14:45)
Its an interesting topic too. All the nations have ostensibly committed themselves to the demilitarization of space, but Russia is accusing the west of effectively using civilian space programs as mercenaries in space, a sort of modern day privateering on the seas. So it becomes an issue of how involved civilians satellites are in active warzones. When they make up the critical communications infrastructure of an opposing army, one that is denied to your own troops but enabled for the enemy, are they legitimate military targets? Are they de facto parties to the conflict? We really have no precedent here, but its clear that 1) The western powers are pushing the envelope on treading on the demilitarization of space and 2) Russia is showing its teeth in response, whether or not they'll actually do anything about it.
For Russia the obvious best case response would be soft power attacks on satellites, knocking their networks out of commission by hacking, without needing to use force to knock them out of the sky. They do clearly possess the capability to do the latter, but it would be a direct escalation
The West being able to supply its allies with a communication infrastructure that cannot be destroyed on the ground is a huge and new technological advantage. It is of course a hypocritical stance by the West to deny this fact. Sure, they can argue that Starlink is a private company and Musk can do with his satellites whatever he wants - but if Russia knocked out Starlink satellites, it is the US military that would have to respond, basically making a mockery out of this argument.
Essentially, we're getting a glimpse into 21st century warfare in real time. The battle has morphed into a struggle over tasks like drone defense and knocking out satellites, or preventing attacks on one's own satellites.