Buying Satellite Imagery of Ukraine Is Dangerously Easy

Earlier this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky got unusually testy over the failure of the United States to deliver anti-missile and anti-drone systems. On March 2, a strike in Odesa had killed 12 people, five of them children. “The world has enough missile-defense systems,” he said. Debates over funding have kept those systems from being delivered. “Delaying the supply of weapons to Ukraine, missile-defense systems to protect our people, leads, unfortunately, to such losses.”

Others in Ukraine’s government, however, have expressed an even deeper frustration. What if Americans, in addition to not sending defensive assistance to Ukraine, are sending offensive assistance to Russia? A Ukrainian military source told me he believes that Russia’s long-range strikes, by cruise missiles that are among the most costly weapons in its nonnuclear arsenal, are aimed using satellite imagery provided by U.S. companies. He says the sequence is clear: A satellite snaps pictures of a site, then some days or weeks later a missile lands. Sometimes another satellite is sent to capture additional images afterward, perhaps to check the extent of the damage. “The number of coincidences, where the images are followed by strikes, is too high to be random,” the source told me. (I agreed not to name him because he is not authorized to speak publicly.)

Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence. But the suspicious cases have added up, and because many satellite-imagery companies offer a backlist of archived images, marked with dates and coordinates, it’s possible to browse tens of thousands of images taken of Ukraine and notice suggestive patterns. In the week before April 2, 2022, about a month after Russia’s initial invasion, images of a remote airfield outside Myrhorod, Ukraine, were requested from American companies at least nine times. Myrhorod is not a particularly interesting place, apart from that airfield. On April 2, missiles landed there. In the week that followed, someone asked for images of the airfield again. Satellite imaging has preceded strikes in urban areas as well: In Lviv, just before March 26, 2022, someone tasked a satellite with looking at a factory used for military-armor production. It, too, was struck. In late January of this year, someone commissioned a commercial-satellite company to take fresh images of Kyiv, just before the city was hit by a missile barrage.

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There are hundreds of such cases. The Ukrainians say they monitor flyovers by Russia’s own satellites. But until recently, they assumed that the satellites of allies would not be available for Russia’s advantage. “Before about six months ago, we couldn’t imagine that private companies would be selling satellite imagery in sensitive areas,” the Ukrainian military official told me. But “it has become hard to believe that [these coincidences] are random.” Russian satellite capabilities are limited, and Ukraine’s are too. Anyone who has seen the social-media footage of ragtag infantrymen huddled in trenches is aware that this war is being fought by two poor countries. But with subterfuge, even poor countries can try to rent the services of rich ones—or, more precisely, the services of the private companies that operate within the rich ones’ borders.

Ukraine’s deputy defense minister, Kateryna Chernohorenko, sent me a statement noting that U.S. satellite companies have supported Ukraine. But she said that her ministry’s experts suspect that Russia “purchases satellite imagery through third-party companies” that do business with Western satellite-imagery companies, and that these images “could be used in armed aggression against Ukraine.”

Ordering imagery from these companies is simpler than you might think. Stale, blurry images are free on Google Maps. Fresh, crisp imagery of something you may or may not wish to blow to smithereens costs a little more. A site called spymesat.com tracks various companies’ satellites and will give a cost estimate for a brand-new image taken the next time one of them passes over the location you choose. In the business, ordering a satellite to take an image is called “tasking.” The companies offer astonishingly fast turnaround times, at costs in the low thousands of dollars. Faster turnaround and higher resolution raise the cost. I zoomed in on the apartment where I stayed in Odesa early in the war, and the site told me that a U.S. company would let me task its satellite for $1,200 when it passed in just a few hours. If I went there now and painted BOMB ME in huge letters on the roof, the paint would still be wet for its close-up.

For even less, one can order archival imagery from Ukraine—some of it very recent, and of militarily significant areas. The city of Zaporizhzhia is about an hour’s drive from the front line. An Atlantic staffer requested a recent satellite photo of that city from a reseller that works with Planet, a San Francisco-based commercial satellite company. The staffer gave the reseller a credit-card number and a name, and received a high-resolution image just minutes later.

Some targets are stationary: You can’t move an air base. But even those are worth monitoring persistently, sometimes weeks or even months before an intended attack. A cruise missile costs about $1 million, so a kopeck-pinching government would happily pay just a few thousand dollars for recent evidence of how a target is being used, what’s there, and what time of day is optimal for maximum damage. Watching a parking lot outside a factory or barracks can tell you when the building is full and when it is empty. A strike on a full building kills more than a strike on an empty one, so these images can theoretically multiply the Ukrainian body count, at minimal extra cost. Many of the images tasked in Ukraine—including many of sites of future strikes—show only cloud cover. These very expensive images of clouds are still much cheaper than another cruise missile.

Two of the largest commercial-satellite-imaging companies in the United States are Maxar and Planet. Both have produced imagery of Ukrainian sites later struck by Russian missiles. Both stressed that they vet their customers diligently, and that they have observed the U.S. regulation that has forbidden transactions with Russia since the beginning of the war. Maxar declined to comment on specific cases of suspicious imagery orders in Ukraine but said it “ceased all business with Russian entities, including resellers, in early March 2022.” Planet said it was dedicated to providing imagery to “responsible actors such as governments, aid and relief organizations, and media,” with “diligent operations to avoid the potential for misuse and abuse.” A spokesperson from Planet told me that after a review of more than a dozen cases of prestrike tasking, the company “did not find evidence of misuse or abuse.” The spokesperson declined to comment further or explain how Planet had exonerated itself in these cases.

Neither company was willing to say whether it had ever detected instances when it suspected that Russia had used its satellites, nor was either willing to describe how it ensured that its customers were not in fact Russian front companies. Maxar and Planet would not say how they would respond if they noticed a suspicious pattern—image tasking, missile strike on a Ukrainian airfield, follow-up tasking. “We regularly conduct thorough reviews” of security, a Maxar spokesperson told me, and have implemented “more stringent controls” for Ukraine imagery.

Sometimes the tasking is benign. If you deal in commodities, you might peek at Odesa’s port to see whether ships are loaded with grain, and whether the world’s grain supply is about to rise. You might also order an image of a wheat field 150 miles north, in Kropyvnytskyi, to see whether the crop is harvested early or late. Even sites of military significance can be of interest to neutral or friendly entities—including the Ukrainian government itself, media organizations, and humanitarian groups that need accurate pictures of the conflict to do their work.

An executive of a firm that analyzes satellite imagery told me that the firm noticed a pattern dating back to 2022, by cross-referencing tasked images against actual attacks. (The executive requested anonymity because the firm does business with the same satellite companies whose images it reviewed, and does not want its relationships to sour over bad publicity.) The executive identified more than 350 Russian missile strikes in the first year of the war, all deep within Ukrainian territory. I showed a selection of cases to Jack O’Connor, who teaches geospatial intelligence at Johns Hopkins University, and he wrote back, “The data suggests that the Russians are doing what the Ukrainians suspect.” He was, however, cautious about what one can infer with certainty, no matter what patterns one sees. “There is no direct causal relation that can be proven from this data.”

In any particular case, it’s impossible to be sure whether the tasking was done with malign intent. That is especially true when the imagery captures a large area. (Maxar, for example, produces very-high-resolution images of whole neighborhoods or even towns.) But the correlations are there. On February 27, 2022, days after the outbreak of war, Maxar was tasked with taking an image near the Belarusian border. On March 6, 2022, a Russian missile hit buildings in Ovruch—which happened to be dead in the middle of the previous week’s tasked image. (Maxar declined to say whether it had taken these images, but a source with access to the company’s catalog confirmed that the images were in it.) On May 18, 2022, with the war in full swing, someone asked Maxar to look at a large square in the town of Lubny. Two days later, a missile struck Lubny, and soon after, someone asked Maxar to take another look, in the area of the original image where the missile had just hit.

The Ukrainian military official acknowledged the possibility that the tasking was just a benevolent citizen or group with curiosity about obscure Ukrainian military assets and armor factories. And he said he had no reason to believe that the companies themselves favor Russia in the war. Planet and Maxar both do a great deal of business with the U.S. government, and intentionally helping Russia would jeopardize contracts and invite regulation.

But the executive I spoke with said that to keep the imagery out of Russian hands, the satellite companies would have to control not just which customers they accept tasking from but also the resale of those images. The executive said the U.S. companies’ process of vetting their customers was “detailed.” Industry experts stressed that the companies have contracts with the U.S. government, and would not gain from doing business with Russia under the table. Although Maxar insists that it no longer does business with Russian entities, including resellers, it did not reply when I asked whether its resellers’ customers also stopped doing business with Russian entities.

The U.S. companies’ desire to avoid doing business with Russia, directly or indirectly, is not in serious doubt. A former U.S. official who worked on commercial-satellite regulation told me that, early in the war, the companies regularly approached the government seeking help to determine whether their customers might be working for the Russians. “It was a confusing time,” he said, “and then companies got better at vetting their customers.” He said the companies had implemented stronger procedures since then. Skies over Ukraine have become crowded with image-capturing satellites. “There are many cooks in the kitchen,” he said—“sometimes five U.S. government agencies at once,” all seeking imagery from commercial and government satellites. And it is very hard to figure out who wants images, and for what purpose. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all that some of those images coincide in space and time with Russian military activities.”

The Ukrainian official told me he would just “like to see these images moderated,” possibly by giving the Ukrainian military a chance to see what images are tasked before they’re taken. He added that “the companies should look very carefully at the records of who has been buying these images,” and probably involve local spy agencies in tracking companies suspected of funneling the images to Moscow. Other Ukrainians I spoke with suggested that instead of blacklisting certain customers, the companies should develop a limited white list of approved taskers, and add to it only when someone is clearly not a Russian agent. (Planet and Maxar did not directly reply when I asked if they had a blacklist or white list, and if so, what one had to do to get on it.)

Andrey Liscovich, a former Silicon Valley executive who now runs a U.S.–based nonprofit funneling nonlethal aid to Ukraine, was skeptical of the companies’ claims that they can control the ultimate destination of their images. “They lack the necessary resources to adequately screen the final recipients of their products,” Liscovitch texted me. He said the answer is regulation, along the lines of statutes in place to blur out satellite imagery of Israel. “Western governments should impose restrictions on the distribution of satellite imagery over Ukraine, ensuring access is granted only to thoroughly vetted recipients.” Chernohorenko, the deputy defense minister, wrote to me that her government “will propose a mechanism to address this issue.”

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The power to regulate these satellites already belongs to the Department of Commerce’s Office of Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA), which specifies conditions whereby any U.S. company with advanced satellites can be forced to “limit data collection and/or dissemination during periods of increased concerns for national security and … foreign policy interests.” CRSRA told me it had issued licenses to Planet and Maxar, but the terms of those licenses—which might impose limits on what images their satellites can produce—are not public information.

The companies that produce imagery sometimes act as if they are neutral, just as Amazon sells books without asking customers why they want to read them. The companies should, under this theory, preserve their credibility by staying independent, rather than offering Ukraine or anyone else veto power over their imagery. This stance sounds awfully pious to Ukrainians worried that the last thing they will ever hear is a Russian missile screaming across the sky. And the companies have, after all, already taken a side. They are American, subject to regulations that force their cooperation with American interests. Some of them have huge Department of Defense contracts. The principal backer of Ukraine is already paying them.

“By no means am I trying to cast a shadow on any of the [imagery] vendors,” the executive told me. He said he supports Ukraine in the war and knows that the Ukrainian military has used satellite imagery from the same companies. (Planet cited customer confidentiality and would not say whether it had given imagery to Ukraine. Maxar did not reply.) “All of them have been very helpful to Ukraine overall. I want there to be a reasonable explanation” for the imagery they have produced, he said—an explanation that shows “no malice or negligence.” But, he added: “With the information that I have access to, I cannot find that explanation.”