The U.S. intelligence community has relied on commercial satellite companies for insights into what’s happening in Ukraine dating back to before Russia’s invasion.
Stacey Dixon, the principal deputy director of national intelligence, acknowledged earlier this week that the Pentagon reached out to specific companies months ago, when Russia was massing troops along the Ukrainian border.
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“Early on, we also asked a few commercial companies … and those of you who helped know who you are, helped us to rapidly make available imagery like the buildup that was happening around Ukraine’s borders to help shed a light on what Russia was doing,” Dixon said at the Space Symposium on Tuesday, according to Defense One. “This allowed others to independently interpret the images, piecing them together with other information, and tell the world what was about to happen.”
HawkEye 360 has tracked Russia’s counterspace activities, while Maxar has documented Russia’s troop buildup and exposed alleged war crimes in the town of Bucha.
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In the early days of the invasion, Maxar was able to capture images of a 40-mile convoy of military vehicles heading from Belarus toward the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. The troops attempting to overtake the capital have since retreated back to Belarus, though the expectation is they’ll resupply and be redeployed back to eastern Ukraine, where they’ve said their focus is now.
The massacre in Bucha, which included a mass grave filled with hundreds of bodies and where other civilians were found shot and killed with their wrists bound behind them, renewed accusations of war crimes from the international community.
The alleged war crimes in Bucha “is a well-staged insinuation, nothing else,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “It’s a bold fake, and we’ve been speaking about that for a couple of days, but no one would listen to us.”
However, the New York Times reported that an analysis of satellite images from Maxar of the area rebuts his denial.
Gen. James Dickinson, the head of U.S. Space Command, told Defense One that commercial satellite companies “can tell the story” because “they have the capability to show, illustrate what is actually happening. When that happens, that allows the department, particularly U.S. Space Command, to do the things they are not doing.”
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Similarly, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said the assistance from satellite companies has been “a wake-up call,” adding that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated “the value of space capabilities. You’re seeing their value in terms of getting the truth out. You’re seeing their value in terms of enabling the fierce resistance that the Ukrainians are putting up … and commercial space is very much a part of that equation.”
