Chinese Retailer Caught Selling Starlink Terminals to Russia

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with 22 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base on January 28, 2024, in Lompoc, California. Chinese drone maker DJI has been found to be selling Starlink terminals on its website in Russia.

SpaceX’s Starlink user terminals are being openly sold in Russia, though CEO Elon Musk has denied knowledge of any such sales in the country.

The terminals, which link users with the Starlink satellite constellation are available on the Chinese company DJI’s website in Russia.

The Shenzhen-based firm is better known as one of the world’s leading drone producers. Soon after Russia began its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, DJI announced it would temporarily suspend business in both countries pending “compliance assessments.”

Now, the terminals it is enabling Russian military communications in the field, Ukrainian intelligence said earlier this month. Musk categorically denied this.

“A number of false news reports claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia. This is categorically false. To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia.” Must wrote in a February 12 post on X (formerly Twitter).

Musk sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine to provide internet coverage early in the war and later withheld the service during a Ukrainian surprise attack in Crimea, citing fear of a nuclear reprisal from Russia.

DJI, SpaceX, and the Russian defense ministry did not immediately respond to Newsweek’s written requests for comment.

As for its drones, DJI said in November 2022: “We take active steps to try to keep our drones from being modified for use as weapons.” It added that it would terminate its relationships with partners who sell company products to customers intending DJI products for combat purposes.

Nevertheless, the unmanned aerial vehicles have found their way into the hands of both sides of the conflict, as tools of reconnaissance as well as attack.

“Both Ukrainians and Russians are continuing to chew through vast quantities of DJI drones on the battlefield, despite massive misgivings about their reliance on Chinese tech,” Faine Greenwood, a senior spatial data scientist with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, wrote in her blog last July.

Greenwood maintains an extensive database of drone deployment in military settings, detailing drone use by militaries, including many incidents involving DJI UAVs.

The U.S. Department of Defense in 2022 added DJI to a blacklist of Chinese companies believed to have ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army. DJI vowed to challenge the move.

The previous year, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control named DJI among eight Chinese tech firms deemed to be complicit in the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang.

Both the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and that of his predecessor, Donald Trump, have said China’s treatment of Uyghurs amounts to genocide.

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