Vladimir Putin should have had his victory parade by now. The Russians planned one through the streets of Kyiv a week after they invaded Ukraine in late February. Nearly six months later, tens of thousands are dead, half the country lies in ruins, and the world economy struggles with severed supply chains and the fallout from sanctions.

In the military realm, instant experts debate ferociously whether the tank is now obsolete, can any surface ship survive modern naval warfare, and why sergeants are more important than generals.

For Ukraine and the Putin regime, these are existential questions. Sovereign states – and even corporations – are pondering the first heavy industrial-scale conflict in Europe since the middle of the 20th Century and some of the questions are being answered far from the trenches.

Rajat Kulshrestha, co-founder & CEO of Australian aerospace and defence company Space Machines, says the war in Ukraine has starkly emphasised the contested nature of the Space Domain. “There is an increased level of investment into space globally to establish sustainable dual-use infrastructure in orbit.”

Understandably, the pressure is felt most keenly in Europe and NATO countries where, Kulshrestha says, “There has been an increased sense of urgency to engage and understand timelines and costs of putting infrastructure in orbit.”

Russia launched massive attacks at Ukraine’s online infrastructure hours before the first tanks rolled over the border (and into the range of a Javelin missile). They took out the Ukrainian government’s satellite capabilities, taking down a host of government websites and services. Crucially, however, this neither put out Kyiv’s eyes nor stilled its voice. One of the lessons learned since the invasion is how to build resilience into national systems which might otherwise be vulnerable to attack.

Ciaran Martin, the former CEO of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, said the Russian cyber offensive weakened Ukraine’s defences but couldn’t “change the outcome of the war.” Other technologies compensated.

Famously, Elon Musk stepped in to offer Ukraine Starlink satellite capacity; thus far, over ten thousand terminals have been delivered. With no ground stations or wiring to attack, Russian electronic warfare units attempted to jam the signals passing between the satellites and the small, mobile terminals. Initially successful, the countermeasures soon failed when Starlink engineers simply tweaked a few lines of code.

Moscow has powerful anti-satellite weapons, but these date from an era when satellites were scarce – with thousands of cheap, tiny Starlink sats in Low Earth Orbit, the interdiction cost is too great. The handful of Russian missiles cost more than the thousands of satellites they need to destroy. As old Joe Stalin used to say, quantity has a quality all of its own, not to mention the other cost of orbital interdiction: space debris.

Musk and Starlink are understandably celebrated in Kyiv, but elsewhere nation-states are looking to secure their sovereign capabilities on the high frontier.

In January this year, the Australian Government announced a tender for the Australian Defence Satellite Communication System. The major contractor will be drawn from a pool of international bidders thanks to the scale and complexity of the project, but dozens of smaller local outfits like Space Machines will contribute to the technology stack.

Interest in sovereign capability development and supply chains was already high because of COVID disruptions, according to Rajat Kulshrestha. The falling cost of accessing space and the need to protect critical space assets from adversaries are key drivers of increased interest by governments. Currently, the Australian Defence Force relies on shared access to Optus and Intelsat orbitals, with the US-led Wideband Global SATCOM network providing added capacity. An Australian Defence Satellite Communication System would place control of this all-important national capability solely within Australian hands.

The intervention of non-state actors such as Musk and Maxar Technologies into an international military conflict was one of the unexpected outcomes of Russia’s invasion. While the Kremlin has had to buy combat services from private military corporations such as the Wagner Group, Ukraine has benefited from the support of Western companies and private organisations providing hardware, services and other support. Maxar, for instance, gained global attention from capturing and publishing fine-grained satellite imagery of Russian troop and materiel movements in the opening days of the campaign – imagery then used by Ukrainian forces to target and destroy invading units.

As Roman Shemakov has written, the war in Ukraine “is fundamentally changing the relationship between the internet and geopolitics”, accelerating this “unprecedented prominence of non-state actors in state-level war”. But further, he argues, it emphasised the importance of information networks during physical conflicts and intensified the fragmentation of previously worldwide networks into smaller, Balkanised “walled gardens.”

At the same time that private corporations and even individuals are plugging themselves into the Ukrainian war, sovereign states are moving to guarantee control over their technologies and channels of communication.

Security and control over the national telecommunication channels are becoming particularly vital for smaller nations that rely primarily on foreign service providers for key military intelligence – like satellite imaging. “Every nation [that] claims to be independent … needs to have its own [imagery] constellation,” argues Volodymyr Usov, former Chairman of the State Space Agency of Ukraine.