Rogozin: Russia does not attack Starlink satellites for fear of starting space war

Russia has all the necessary means to destroy Starlink’s orbital grouping, but they will start a war in space, former Russian deputy prime minister under Putin and ex-director general of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said.

“Our country is capable of destroying the entire enemy communications system, but Russian satellites will be destroyed in response,” he announced on the air of the "Moscow speaking" radio station.

According to him, if it is needed to “physically destroy the orbital grouping of the enemy or opponents, we will do it very quickly”.

“We have all the necessary means for this. The only question is this: as soon as we do this, that is, an attack on spacecraft in order to take them out of combat duty - it’s casus belli, a pretext for war, transferring it now into space. And then we will immediately lose not only our entire space grouping, which will also be destroyed but there will be some other actions. This is what we talked about, about the escalation of the war,” he remarked.

Earlier, Rogozin said that Russia needs a satellite communications system like Starlink.

At the end of February 2022, Head of SpaceX, Elon Musk, announced that he had opened access to his Starlink global satellite communications system in Ukraine and sent the first terminals there. Later, Ukraine's Digital Transformation Minister Mikhail Fedorov said that Kyiv received 22,000 Starlink terminals and expects to receive another 10,000.

SpaceX is considered the largest satellite operator in the world. The Starlink Internet network is available to users in 51 countries, including North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.