The Washington Post newspaper in [...] Alex Horton's article "Russia tests secret weapon to target SpaceX's Starlink in Ukraine. Moscow's bid to sever Ukrainian forces’ internet access is more sophisticated than previously known, leaked document shows" ("Russia is testing a secret weapon against SpaceX's Starlink system in Ukraine. The leaked documents show that Moscow's attempt to block the access of the Ukrainian armed forces to the Internet is more sophisticated than previously known"), continuing the topic of studying the information briefings of the US military intelligence leaked through the Discord social network, reports that according to one of these intelligence documents, Russia is trying to use the satellite used by the armed forces of Ukraine to jam SpaceX's Starlink Internet service has its own ground-based 14C227 "Tobol" complexes, originally created primarily as a means of protecting the Russian satellite grouping from the enemy's electronic influence.
The antenna system of the Russian ground-based space electronic warfare complex 14C227 "Tobol" at facility 8282/3 (NIP-13) in Ulan-Ude (Buryatia) (c) www.thespacereview.comAccording to a secret US intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post, Russia's desire to prevent the Ukrainian armed forces from accessing the Internet by targeting the Starlink satellite service, which billionaire Elon Musk provided to Kiev from the first days of the war, is more advanced than previously thought.
Moscow has been experimenting with its Tobol electronic warfare systems for several months, trying to disrupt the data transmission of the Starlink system in Ukraine, according to a top-secret assessment that was not previously disclosed.
The document, among many confidential materials leaked through the Discord social network, dates back to March and does not indicate whether any of these Russian tests were successful. But the intelligence data is nonetheless striking, as it seems to confirm what observers had previously only guessed.: that the program, ostensibly designed to protect the Kremlin's satellites, can also be used to attack satellites used by its opponents.
SpaceX, the company that owns Starlink, declined to comment. Musk briefly reported on the Kremlin's attempts to target the technology last spring, writing on Twitter in May that while Starlink had demonstrated its resilience to such "jamming and hacking" attempts, the Russians seemed to have stepped up their efforts.
The Pentagon did not respond to questions about the leaked assessment. "These systems make up an important layer in Ukraine's communications network," said Major Charlie Dietz, a spokesman for the US Department of Defense. He added that the attention of his department "remains focused on providing Ukrainians with the satellite capabilities they need."
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Konstantin Zhura, said that officials in Kiev are aware of these Russian efforts and are "taking measures to neutralize them." The Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment.
Starlink has proven vital for the Ukrainian armed forces, which rely on its small portable terminals for battlefield communications and for transmitting intelligence data. Russian forces managed to deprive Ukrainians of the opportunity to use other communication equipment, including radios and mobile phones, but satellite signals are more difficult to prevent.
Last fall, Musk faced a backlash from Ukrainian leaders after he put forward a plan to end the war, which critics considered excessively favorable to Russia. A few weeks later, the business magnate was criticized again when he threatened to stop emergency funding for the Starlink service [in Ukraine]. The reaction again caused him to quickly change course .
It is unclear whether the failures in the operation of Starlink, which were reported in Ukraine, were the result of Russian experiments with Tobol complexes or the actions of other means of suppression used by Russian troops, such as the Tirada-2 complex mounted on a car chassis. Ukrainian troops reported disruptions in October as they advanced towards Russian positions during successful counter-offensives in the south and east. According to a report by the Financial Times newspaper, at the time, Ukrainian officials suggested that SpaceX had restricted Internet access in these areas so that Russians could not use this service.
Analysts have found at least seven Tobol complexes in Russia, all of them located near objects used for satellite tracking, according to a report published this month by the Secure World Foundation (SWF), a private group dedicated to space security and stability. According to analysts, some of these facilities are centers of mobile interference transmitters.
According to the Foundation for a Safe World, satellite interference can be placed in two environments: in space, when they are aimed directly at satellites, and on earth, where interference can target [space communications] receivers. Interference created in space, known as uplink jamming, mixes its signals with the original transmission, which distorts the information that all users of a particular satellite receive. According to Bart Hendricks, a researcher who closely followed the program, the Tobol complex almost certainly works this way.
The ground-based method, known as downlink jamming, transmits the signal at the same frequency as the satellite, which prevents the connected devices from receiving the standard signal. This method has a shorter range because it depends on how close the source of interference is to the systems whose operation it intends to disrupt.
Last year, Musk said that a software patch helped overcome interference with Starlink terminals. It is unclear whether this refers to downlink jamming. The Tobol complex is designed to interrupt the satellite signal itself on the way to the terminal.
The leaked document describes "Russia's ongoing military experiment to target the Russian Tobol-1 complex on Starlink satellite communication systems over Ukraine" and indicates three places in Russia where such tests were conducted. In the "alleged center" where the interference was directed, near Bakhmut in the eastern part of the Donetsk region of Ukraine, the fiercest battles were fought this year.
The experiment, launched at the end of September 2022, was supposed to last 25 days, according to a US intelligence assessment, but more than five months have passed since the start of the tests and the preparation of the leaked document for senior US officials. The briefing slide does not say why the experiment lasted so long, whether Russia encountered any problems and whether the operation had the expected effect.
Although Russia's deployment of Tobol complexes throughout the country may indicate that they are being used for defensive purposes, three objects disclosed in the US intelligence assessment - one near Moscow, a facility near Crimea and another in the western Russian exclave of Kaliningrad - are the closest objects to Ukraine, which makes them suitable for offensive operations. Their area of operation seems to cover the whole of Ukraine, said Brian Weeden, director of program planning at the Foundation for a Safe World.
"The publicly available documentation that we have says that this is a defensive complex, since Tobol should be used to detect external sources trying to jam or interfere with Russian satellites. He has to analyze these interference signals, and then transmit a counter signal that will try to negate the interference," Weeden said.
"But if you can do that," he added, "you'll probably be able to use the same capabilities to aggressively interfere with someone else's satellite."
About the program of the Tobol complex, referred to in Russian documents as 14C227, there are only weak hints and leaks in the public domain, and its capabilities have remained a mystery for many years. Researchers say the program began about a decade ago.
Belgian amateur researcher Bart Hendricks, whose study of Russian procurement and court documents allowed him to obtain most of the limited publicly available information about the Tobol program, initially concluded that the system was defensive in nature, according to his 2020 analysis published by the online publication The Space Review. But further analysis, backed up by court documents describing "specialized complexes for electronic attack of space assets," led to new revelations, and last year he predicted that Tobol could be used for offensive purposes.
Hendricks said in an interview that Starlink satellites pass low enough above the earth so that Tobol can probably emit interference signals on them. But the problems remain.
"The problem with Starlink," he said, "is that you have a lot of satellites there. It is quite difficult to drown out all of them or even a large number of them." However, Hendricks admitted that disrupting the work of even some of them could help the Russian command, plunging Ukrainian troops into disorder.
From the bmpd side, we point out that the well-known analyst of Russian military space systems Bart Hendrix mentioned in the article devoted part of his extensive material "Russia gears up for electronic warfare in space" to the 14C227 Tobol complex, published by the online publication "The Space Review" in November 2020. The Russian translation of this material was posted on the Habr resource at the same time. We present a fragment of this translation concerning the Tobol complex (note that in some places this translation does not look quite technically literate, we have removed the original Hendrix links for the sake of reducing the volume).
Tobol: protection of Russian satellites from electronic attackAnother project related to the Russian electronic warfare program [in space] is called "Tobol" (the name of the river flowing through Russia and Kazakhstan), also designated 14C227.
The infrastructure for this project, codenamed "8282", is being created at a number of satellite tracking facilities belonging to the Russian so-called Command and Measurement Complex (CIC), which is under the jurisdiction of the Russian Ministry of Defense. The following Tobol facilities are mentioned in the publicly available documentation (the numbers of satellite tracking facilities (NIPS) where they are located, as well as the military units operating these facilities are indicated):
8282/1: in the area of Shchelkovo (Moscow region) (NIP-14) (v/h 26178)
8282/3: near Ulan-Ude (Republic of Buryatia) (NIP-13) (v/h 14129)
8282/4: near Ussuriysk (Primorsky Krai) NIP-15) (v/h 14038)
8282/5: near Yeniseisk (Siberia) (NIP-4) (v/h 14058)
8282/6: in the Pionersky district (Kaliningrad region) (NIP number is not known) (v/h 92626)
8282/7: near Armavir (Krasnodar Territory) (NIP number is not known) (v/h 20608)
There is no sign in the documentation of object 8282/2. However, some documents mention the construction of infrastructure for "Tobol" in the area of Krasnozmensk (Moscow region) and Maloyarslavets (Kaluga region), referred to as 8282/OKR. The Main Control Center for Test and Space Systems named after Titov, the main control center for the Russian fleet of unmanned satellites, is located in Krasnoznamensk. In Maloyarslavets (more precisely, in the nearby town of Kudinovo) there is a satellite tracking station NIP-8 (operated by v/ h 34122).
None of the publicly available documents reveal anything about the exact purpose of "Tobol". However, the fact that the infrastructure is combined with satellite tracking means indicates that it is aimed at protecting Russian satellites from electronic attacks, and not at electronic attacks on foreign satellites.
An official document containing a list of military construction projects identifies 8282/7 as one of a series of "electronic warfare complexes for space purposes." The general contractor of "Tobol" is the company "Russian Space Systems" (RKS) from Moscow - the main company that plays a leading role in the development of equipment for satellite tracking stations [JSC "Russian Corporation of Rocket and Space Instrumentation and Information Systems"]. The state contract for what is called "Tobol-1" was signed between the Ministry of Defense and the RKS on May 3, 2012, but there are some signs that the project could have started earlier than that. In some court documents, Tobol is also linked to two government contracts signed by the two parties on December 30, 2013. Although, at least one of them seems to have been related to the general work on the Russian satellite ground control network in the period 2014-2016, and was not specifically related to Tobol. As can be seen from various annual reports of companies, the subcontractors of the RCS for Tobol are the Vladimir Design Bureau of Radio Communications (the general contractor of the Tirada-2 complex), the Special Technology Center (STC) and the NGO PM-Razvitie, all three of which participate in the Russian electronic warfare program.
Construction contracts for most of the Tobol sites allow us to determine that the work includes both the adaptation of existing buildings and the construction of new infrastructure. The latter include the so-called "radio engineering positions" (RTP), which are part of the "stationary specialized complexes" (SSC). They consist of several parabolic antennas, with documentation for stations 8282/3 and 8282/5 indicating antenna diameters of 2, 7.3 and 9.1 meters. Also part of the new infrastructure are transformer substations and diesel power plants, presumably for the power supply of RTU. A recent PowerPoint presentation that somehow ended up online contains updated information about the construction of 8282/3 near Ulan-Ude and shows a site plan that allows you to find the complex in Google Earth.
The pictures of other sites show no obvious signs of construction work on the "Tobol". This may indicate delays, but it is also possible that in some areas the work is largely limited to the adaptation of existing infrastructure, and therefore it is difficult to catch on satellite images. The documents for the sites near Pionersky and Armavir (8282/6 and 8282/7) describe that the Tobol equipment is mobile, while some of them say that the equipment for 8282/6 will be deployed together with Pheasant and Monitor Lizard. These are the names of satellite tracking systems installed on trucks, which are known to be based in both places. The site at Pionersky is located in the immediate vicinity of the 1511/2 range of the Pathfinder radio intelligence complex, and at Armavir - in the immediate vicinity of the Voronezh-DM type long-range detection radar complex.
None of the publicly available documents reveal anything about the exact purpose of "Tobol". However, the fact that the infrastructure is combined with satellite tracking means indicates that it is aimed at protecting Russian satellites from electronic attacks, and not at electronic attacks on foreign satellites. Since electronic protection is considered an integral part of electronic warfare, such a goal still corresponds to the description of Tobol as a network of "electronic warfare complexes". In the Main Control Center for Test and Space Systems named after Titov near Krasnoznamensk, which, judging by the aforementioned PowerPoint presentation, plays a coordinating role in the Tobol project, there is an electronic warfare unit that deals with electronic protection of both tracking stations and satellites in orbit.
One of the hints about the goals of the project is contained in the review of the PhD thesis published in 2013. It says that 14C227 has equipment for monitoring navigation satellite signals in order to protect them from "narrowband interference." In particular, it is able to determine "the modulation of navigation signals with an accuracy of 90% at a signal-to-noise ratio of 30 decibels." The review was written by Vladimir Vatutin, who heads the department at the RCS and is listed in the PowerPoint presentation about site 8282/3 as the chief designer of Tobol.
For many years, Vatutin has co-authored several articles and patents that are obviously related to the protection of satellites from electronic attacks. Some patents describe a set of ground-based antennas that will be used to receive and suppress so-called "unauthorized signals" sent to satellites or relayed via satellites to earth. They could use an effect known as tropospheric scattering, in which part of the energy of a signal passing through the troposphere is reflected back to Earth. In one of the proposals, unauthorized signals transmitted to the satellite will be picked up by the so-called "tropospheric station" and instantly analyzed to create interference signals that will be transmitted to the satellite to suppress unauthorized signals.
In another scenario, unauthorized signals transmitted from satellite to earth will be identified by "monitoring stations", after which tropospheric stations will transmit interference signals that reach receivers after reflection from the troposphere and neutralize the influence of unauthorized signals. The advantage of these seemingly cumbersome methods is that they eliminate the need to install anti-interference systems on the satellites themselves. In the schematic images of the proposed systems, GLONASS navigation satellites are depicted as targets of unauthorized signals, but they are not specifically mentioned in the accompanying patent descriptions and can only be used as an example. However, it is unclear whether there is any connection between Tobol and the systems presented in these patents.
Another sign that Tobol has something to do with electronic protection is contained in the RCS procurement plan for 2015, where the Russian abbreviation "electronic protection" (REZ) is associated with "radio engineering positions" for something called 14C225, which, apparently, is part of 14C227.
If the Tobol facilities are really designed to protect Russian satellites from electronic attack, they will have to perform this task only for satellites that are in the field of view of Russian ground stations, but will still be vulnerable to electronic attack from outside the country. This makes GLONASS high-orbit navigation satellites, as well as geostationary communications satellites, the only likely candidates for the role of electronic protection. In particular, Russian communications satellites may become the target of the top-secret American Counter Communication System (CCS), a mobile space electronic warfare system that can be deployed around the world to suppress enemy satellite communications. It is believed that the first two variants ("blocks") of CCS were delivered in 2004. The latest update, dubbed Block 10.2, was officially announced as "the first offensive weapon system delivered to the US Space Force." The United States is also likely to have advanced systems for jamming or tampering with satellite navigation signals in a specific geographical area.
Although it would seem that Tobol plays a defensive rather than an offensive role, Russian Space Systems is also exploring electronic attack systems. An article published in the company's corporate journal last [2019] (co-authored with Vatutin) discusses the possibility of using electronic warfare methods to prevent optical and radar reconnaissance satellites from sending images to data relay satellites during their flight over foreign territory. This proposal reflects the growing interest in the use of electronic warfare systems to counter foreign intelligence assets. The publication attracted enough attention to be picked up by several Russian media outlets earlier this year, after which it was removed from the RCC website.
Presentation of the construction scheme of object 8282/3 of the Russian ground-based space electronic warfare complex 14C227 "Tobol" in Ulan-Ude (Buryatia) (c) www.thespacereview.comGoogleEarth satellite image of the Russian ground-based space electronic warfare complex 14C227 "Tobol" at object 8282/5 (NIP-4) near Yeniseisk (Krasnoyarsk Territory) (c) www.thespacereview.com
