this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
145 points (100.0% liked)

World News

41185 readers
4253 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Summary

The U.S. has reportedly warned Ukraine that access to SpaceX's Starlink satellite internet could be cut off if Kyiv does not agree to a deal granting the U.S. access to its critical minerals.

This was raised in talks after Ukrainian President Zelenskiy rejected a proposal involving a 50% share of Ukraine's minerals, including lithium and uranium.

Starlink is crucial for Ukraine’s military operations, and losing it would be a significant blow.

Negotiations are ongoing, but tensions between Zelenskiy and Trump are escalating over Ukraine's war strategy and mineral wealth.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

This would be a major setback. And thus, describes the intent of the Trump administration - to extort a peace on their terms, as if they were the enemy - quite vividly.

For sea drones, there could be a work-around (some other satcom system) but for ordinary units on ground, a work around must be cheap - for them, engineers would be drilling posts into ground and running temporary fiber to temporary base stations like there's no tomorrow. One hop of fiber can be quite long, 80 km is no problem with really cheap COTS hardware (professional hardware can probably talk over hundreds of kilometers). It's making changes that is problematic.

Of course, units would also fall back to using civilian cell phone networks, some with directional antennas (e.g. you know that 10 km to your rear is an intact base station at (X,Y), you point a 20 decibel parabolic dish towards that direction and get online without the enemy having a good idea about your whereabouts. A big hassle, but not an insurmountable one.

Long range strike drones 99% likely aren't using Starlink. They fly by inertial navigation and machine vision, and pick up clues from Russian mobile networks.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 hours ago

This is why the world needs to decouple themselves from American technology. We need more options.