Russia Is Developing Orbiting Clouds of Shrapnel to Take Down Starlinks, NATO Suspects

Of the more than 14,000 active satellites in low-Earth orbit today, roughly two-thirds belong to Elon Musk’s Starlink. Governments worldwide—including the United States—depend on these satellites for remote communications, military operations, and internet access. It appears Russia may be developing a new strategy to take them down.

NATO intelligence findings reviewed by the Associated Press suggest Russia is developing a weapon that would target Starlinks with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel. The “zone-effect” weapon would flood their orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets to disable multiple satellites at once, the AP reports.

Gizmodo could not independently verify the findings but reached out to the U.S. Space Force (USSF), Russia’s presidential press office, and SpaceX for comment. None responded by the time of publication.

The suggestion that Russia may be investing in new ways to target Starlinks doesn’t come as a surprise. The satellites have played a critical role in Ukraine’s defense against President Vladimir Putin’s invasion. What does shock some experts is the idea that Russia would pursue an attack strategy that could endanger its own satellites and those of its allies.

Russia’s potential motive

Just days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, Starlink satellites became active over Ukraine. The move followed a request from Ukrainian leadership to SpaceX to replace internet services that had already been destroyed by Russian forces.

Since then, Starlinks have proven essential to Ukraine’s survival, upholding critical civilian infrastructure, battlefield communications, and defensive military operations such as drone strikes, surveillance, and artillery coordination.

Russian officials have warned that they could target commercial satellites supporting Ukraine’s military. The ability to disrupt Ukraine’s Starlink access would certainly enhance Russia’s advantage, but deploying this type of weapon could come at a significant cost to the invading nation.

Risky unintended consequences

Flooding Starlink orbits with shrapnel could disable multiple satellites at once, but it would also risk collateral damage to other spacecraft. Such an attack could get “out of control in a hurry,” Brigadier General Christopher Horner, the commander of the Canadian military’s Space Division, told the AP.

“You blow up a box full of BBs,” he said. Doing that would “blanket an entire orbital regime and take out every Starlink satellite and every other satellite that’s in a similar regime. And I think that’s the part that is incredibly troubling.”

The current number of Russian satellites in orbit is unclear, but Russia maintains an active presence with military, commercial, and experimental satellites in low-Earth orbit and geostationary-Earth orbit, according to USSF. China, a key Russia ally, had nearly 1,200 satellites in orbit as of July 2025, USSF reports.

Deploying a zone-effect weapon could, in theory, damage these assets. China’s Tiangong Space Station and the International Space Station—of which Russia is a key partner—would also be in danger of debris impacts from such attacks.

“I would be very surprised, frankly, if [Russia] were to do something like that,” Victoria Samson, a space-security specialist at the Secure World Foundation who leads the organization’s annual study of anti-satellite systems, told the AP.

Still, it’s not outside the realm of possibility, Horner said. “If the reporting on the nuclear weapons system is accurate and that they’re willing to develop that and willing to go to that end, well it wouldn’t strike me as shocking that something just short of that, but equally damaging, is within their wheelhouse of development,” he told the AP.

What’s more, this strategy begins to make sense when one considers the fact that Russia is falling woefully behind the U.S. across multiple domains of space technology. Starlink alone dwarfs the combined population of both Russia’s and China’s orbital spacecraft. By knocking out commercial satellites, Russia may attempt to level the playing field, even if it means taking out some of its own assets and potentially losing access to low-Earth orbit.

Much about this potential threat to the Starlink constellation remains unknown, underscoring how rapidly warfare is evolving as space itself becomes a battlefield. As nations continue to push the boundaries of their orbital capabilities, the next conflict could play out high above Earth’s surface.