A joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde has uncovered secret military documents showing China and Russia developed a multi-stage plan to disable and potentially destroy Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network.
The reporters obtained four presentations delivered at a previously unpublicized bilateral forum, the Third China-Russia Military-Technical Cooperation Forum, held in Guangzhou in November 2023, along with a signed working protocol from separate negotiations in Moscow that June.
Chinese and Russian authorities have jointly denied the findings, according to United24 Media, and European officials are reportedly evaluating potential sanctions against Beijing in response.
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The Starlink-specific presentation was delivered by two researchers from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. The presentation has an internal classification, one tier above what China clears for public release, and was delivered by two CASC researchers. CASC builds China’s Long March rockets and runs much of the country’s military satellite program, making it the natural author of a document assessing how to counter a rival constellation.
The document laid out a three-stage escalation plan. The first stage calls for joint legal and diplomatic pressure, using Starlink’s satellite density to argue for international regulatory limits on the constellation’s expansion. The second seeks to physically block Starlink’s growth by jointly filing for the same frequency bands and orbital slots the network needs and generating shared electromagnetic jamming. The third and most aggressive stage combines cyberattacks on civilian user terminals with what the researchers called “low-cost countermeasures” designed on a “one-against-many” principle, cheap weapons built to destroy satellites faster than SpaceX (Nasdaq: SPCX) can replace them.
The presentation frames the threat in terms of Starlink’s role in Ukraine. By late 2023, SpaceX had delivered more than 40,000 Starlink terminals to Ukraine’s military, where the network became central to coordinating medical evacuations, artillery targeting, and real-time drone operations. Mykhailo Fedorov, who held Ukraine’s digital transformation portfolio at the time and now serves as defense minister, put it starkly that September: Starlink, he said, was “actually the blood of our entire communications infrastructure.” US officials have called the system effectively irreplaceable to Ukraine’s war effort.
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The documents point to a broader pattern of cooperation beyond satellites. A signed working protocol from the June 2023 Moscow talks, which reporters say they independently verified using flight data for the officials named in it, shows Chinese Central Military Commission procurement officials meeting secretly with Russia’s Almaz-Antey, the country’s leading air defense manufacturer, to develop an integrated missile-defense system explicitly aimed at intercepting US hypersonic weapons.
The material reportedly spans five weapons domains in total: space weapons and satellite destruction, integrated air and missile defense, autonomous drone swarms, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation. Russian forces, the reporting adds, are already fielding autonomous drones built with Chinese AI modules and components, giving Beijing real-world combat data from a war it has publicly maintained neutrality.
“China is trying to project an appearance of neutrality,” Alexander Gabuev, head of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told The Insider. “Officially the message is: we are not involved, we help both sides.”
European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said on June 15 that the bloc had “now verified reports that the Chinese military has been training Russian military personnel to fight in Ukraine.” China’s foreign ministry rejected the claim as “purely slander and smears.”
Russia trades frontline combat data from Ukraine for access to advanced Chinese electronics and mass-production capacity, a “bargain” that lets Moscow counter Ukrainian drone attacks. At the same time, Beijing preserves its official posture of neutrality.
Western intelligence agencies are reportedly monitoring the projects closely, in part because Starlink is central to Ukraine’s battlefield communications, and in part because SpaceX is also a major US military contractor, building and launching American spy satellites and operating Starshield, the hardened military version of Starlink.
