On the eve of Russia's special operation to protect Donbass, the US special services have more than doubled the purchase of commercial satellite images. SpaceNews tells about the surveillance of the American side of the Russian army in Ukraine from space and the transfer of relevant data to Kiev.
"We cooperate with more than 100 companies, we currently use images from at least 200 commercial satellites and there are about 20 or so different analytical services in our portfolio," said David Gauthier, director of commercial and business operations at the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.
According to him, in case of bad weather, for example, high clouds, and at night, radar satellites are of particular value for observations. "We took the entire IT architecture that we usually work with and connected companies via the Internet directly to analysts in Ukraine," he said.
The publication writes that this allowed the Ukrainian side to understand where it is necessary to strengthen the defense, and where the infrastructure suffers.
The magazine notes that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency separately turned to HawkEye 360, which owns satellites for detecting radio signals, in order to help determine the location of radio-electronic sources that can interfere with the operation of radio communications and the Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation system.
In March, SpaceNews wrote that SI Imaging Services (SIIS) from South Korea refused to share its own satellite images with the government of Ukraine.
In January, the head of the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, Konstantin Belousov, said that the Ukrainian satellite for remote sensing of the Earth, Sich-2-30, had contacted, but was experiencing problems "due to a shortage of energy," because "it turned to the Sun so that only the reflection of light from the Earth gets on its working surfaces."
