Just as Ukraine’s military campaign has been supported by US commercial spacecraft operating firms — with SpaceX and Maxar providing broadband communications and Earth imagery respectively — a Russian private army group has apparently also benefitted from the help of a Chinese commercial space firm.
SPACETY, the commercial operating arm of China’s Tianyi Research Institute, has allegedly furnished the Russian Wagner group with imagery from its Hisea-1 and Chaohu-1 (Tianxian-1) C-band SAR-equipped satellites, via a Russian intermediary firm called Terra Tech to help it in its fight with Ukraine’s armed forces.
The Wagner Group is a division of privateer soldiers, some of whom are reported to be Russian “Dirty Dozen-style” convicts-turned-commandos who buy their freedom via service to Wagner and to the Russian State. The group led Russia’s recent recapture of the small Ukrainian town of Soledar, near Bakhmut.
SPACETY has since been officially sanctioned by the US Treasury Department for allegedly supplying the Russian Wagner Group with its synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite imagery, classing it as a transactional criminal organisation. The China/Luxembourg-based company denies that it has ever had any business dealings with either the Wagner Group or Terra Tech, and that its end user agreements with other clients prevents any military use of its imagery.
Comment by David Todd: The war in Ukraine is rapidly turning into a Cold War-style “proxy war” with the Western (and other) democracies supporting Ukraine via its military supplies, technology and allegedly, military intelligence, while Belarus, Iran and North Korea etc are supplying Russia with drones and munitions. China has officially stayed neutral during the conflict but has, at times, been critical of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, China is thought to be providing at least some tacit support to the Putin regime.
The Dirty Dozen (1967) is a fictional war movie set in World War II in which US Army convicts are turned into an assassination squad to kill Nazi German Generals. Courtesy: MGM
