Volna Kupol Garant, the jammer Moscow built to break Ukraine’s Starlink link, is entering series production. Russian state media said Aug. 28 that assembly lines are running, quoting an unnamed official in the national defense industry.
Each unit costs around 100M rubles, roughly $1.5M, and blankets about 20 square kilometers. It can target only one satellite at a time, and the powerful radio emissions it needs to work make it easy to find.
Ukraine has made destroying the systems a running theme of 2026. In mid-June, drone units struck six trailer-mounted modules near the southern front, and open-source analysis later confirmed another destroyed in Kerch, Crimea. The pattern repeats: Moscow deploys a jammer to shield a supply corridor, allied signals intelligence picks up its emissions, SpaceX flags the interference, and Ukrainian drones hunt the hardware down.
Serial production matters because Starlink underpins Ukrainian drone operations, battlefield messaging and strike coordination. Fielding more units suggests Moscow intends to keep pressing the jammer despite the losses. Russian media have also played up the system’s potential to blunt Ukrainian long-range strikes.
The economics cut both ways. Jamming a satellite constellation from the ground is expensive and fragile, which is why Russia is also pushing a homegrown satellite internet as a fallback. For Ukraine’s partners, the cycle shows how quickly ground-based counterspace gear can be detected, located and removed from the fight.
