Russia is creating a killer of enemy satellites, the “Tobol” warfare system.
Russia is creating a killer of enemy satellites, according to classified Pentagon documents, says the Washington Post. Moscow, they say, has been experimenting with its own for months electronic warfare system “Tobol”in order to hinder the satellite operations of “Starlink”, which is owned by Elon Musk, and whose services have been available to Kiev for free since the beginning of the conflict.
“The leaked document dates back to March and does not indicate whether any of the Russian tests were successful. But the intelligence revelation is striking nonetheless because it confirms what observers had previously only assumed: that a program supposedly designed to protect the Kremlin’s satellites could instead be used to attack those used by its adversaries.”according to the American media.
SpaceX, which owns the Starlink network, did not comment on the leaked information, but last spring Musk addressed the Kremlin’s alleged attempts to compromise its satellites, noting that while they have shown resistance to jamming and hacking attempts, “the Russians seem to be intensifying efforts”.
The spokesman of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, Konstantin Zhura, stated that officials in Kiev are aware of these Russian efforts and are “taking measures to neutralize them”. However, how successful are these measures? “Ukrainian troops reported experiencing signal problems in October while moving toward Russian positions during a counteroffensive in the south and east. It is unclear whether the Starlink outages reported in Ukraine were the result of Russian experiments with the Tobol system or other jamming capabilities used by Russian forces, such as the truck-mounted Tirada-2 systemaccording to “Washington Post”.
Analysts claim the Russians have at least seven Tobol systems, all of which are located next to facilities used to track satellites, the report said.released this month by a group focused on space security and sustainability, the Foundation for a Safe World.
Satellite jamming, they say, can happen in space, by directly targeting satellites, and on the ground, where weapons target receivers. The ground-based method, known as “downlink jamming,” transmits the signal on the same frequency as the satellite, which prevents connected devices from receiving it.
However, it is less effective because, in order to function, the jammer needs to be relatively close to the systems it intends to disrupt. Interference that occurs in space is known as “uplink jamming”, and there, due to interference between the attacker’s and the broadcaster’s signals, the information received by satellite users is distorted.
The leaked document, according to this paper, describes “Russia’s ongoing military operational experiment to target the Starlink satellite communications system over Ukraine with the Russian Tobol-1 and identifies three locations in Russia where the tests were conducted.”The evaluated center” where the tests were directed, is located near Bahmut where the fiercest fighting takes place during the Special Military Operation.
“Although Russia’s positioning of Tobol complexes across the country might suggest that they are being used for defensive purposes, three locations revealed in the US intelligence assessment, one outside Moscow, then a location near Crimea and in Kaliningrad, are the closest facilities to Ukraine, making them suitable for an offensive operation“, states the “Washington Post”.
According to the director of program planning at the “Safe World Foundation” Brian Widen, their area of coverage includes the whole of Ukraine.
“The public documentation we have indicates that it is a defense system, since the ‘Tobol’ would be used to detect attempts to jam Russian satellites, or their jamming. It would analyze those jamming signals and then emit a counter-signal, which would try to negate the jamming,” Weeden explains, adding, however, that, “if you can do that, you can probably use the same capabilities to offensively jam someone’s satellite.”reports RT Balkan.
(WORLD)