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.
But even the newest Russian satellites have been affected by wartime Western sanctions.
“This is definitely something they'll be struggling with in terms of where they get their components from and Russian satellites have historically been made of Western components,” said Suess.
In August, the head of Russia’s largest spacecraft manufacturer opened a rare window on the problems facing the country’s space industry, saying “we need to stop lying to ourselves” about the condition it was in.
Igor Maltsev, head of Energia, spoke of chronic underfunding, “ineffective” processes, and lost motivation.
“We've definitely seen Russia build up their capabilities. But on the whole, we can still say that Russia doesn't have particularly good Earth-observation capabilities, and this is also a broader problem that they're having in terms of their space industry lagging behind massively," said Suess.
The quality of the Chinese satellites, particularly in regard to synthetic aperture radar or SAR (which can see through clouds, for instance), is generally reckoned to be much higher than Russia’s -- providing higher resolution imagery and building 3D images.
“In terms of the quantity, diversity, and quality of the data the Chinese can provide, there is no doubt it'll be useful for Russian intelligence and military analysts,” Bleddyn Bowen, who has advised the Pentagon and UK Defense Ministry on space policy, told RFE/RL.
The key advantage, said Bowen, who is an associate professor in astro-politics at Durham University, was better battle damage assessment.
“It could be better tracking of Ukrainian military maneuvers…. If a hill has been evacuated and nobody's there and a satellite can see that, then if you get notice of that an hour after this happened as opposed to after four hours that makes your forces much more responsive,” he said.
So far, this has been an area where Ukraine has enjoyed an advantage over Russia during the war, receiving satellite intelligence from the United States and also European allies. The importance of this data was underlined when Washington briefly stopped supplying it earlier this year.
The week-long move hindered Ukraine’s ability to carry out effective long-range drone strikes and left it blind over the movements of Russian strategic bomber aircraft and ballistic missile launches.
What Does China Want?
But it remains unclear how much data, if any, China is actually sending to Russia. Western officials have refrained from making specific public accusations on the issue.
“China is the decisive enabler of Russia’s war in Ukraine. China also provides nearly 80 percent of the dual-use items Russia needs to sustain the war,” an official at the State Department told RFE/RL.
“Continued cooperation between these two countries will only further contribute to global instability and make the United States and other countries less safe,” the official added.
In an interview with RFE/RL’s Current Time, the European Union’s commissioner for defense and space, Andrius Kubilius, was noncommittal.
“What is the Chinese position towards the whole war? We can guess, you know. It looks like that they are, you know, keen to keep this war going on as long as possible, learning also from that war, supporting, you know, Russian side,” he said.
Swope pointed out that little is known about the specific Yaogan satellites that reportedly spied on Ukraine. Three of them, he said, were SAR-equipped.
“I think the big question might be…are they just providing more strategic intelligence and even tactical intelligence about what's happening on the battlefield? Or are these systems somehow tied in to, say, how you would steer a missile?” he said.
Equally, he said, the Chinese satellites could have been gathering information purely for study back in Beijing, “for their own assessment of how conflict is going to be fought in the future.”
Bowen agreed that China’s intentions were unclear.
“It remains to be seen how close, how tactical is that relationship between Russia and China on this,” he said. “Because they're not natural allies, really. China does not want to tip its hand too much to the Russians.”
Another important issue is having sufficient capacity to receive and evaluate incoming information. This is where data-processing becomes decisive, and it is unclear what Russia’s capabilities are in this regard.
“This is something that Western militaries have to contend with as well,” said Suess.
“We talk about a sensor-rich battlefield now, but actually the bottleneck is the processing. This is where AI comes in. This is where the sort of algorithm comes in…filtering through the massive information that you get given,” she added.
