Shooting Starlink: The “no limits” partnership between Russia and China is taking aim at Elon Musk

Secret documents from a series of clandestine Russian-Chinese military forums reveal a joint plan to defeat Elon Musk’s Starlink and a weapons development partnership far deeper than either country will admit. From air- and missile-defense systems to AI-enhanced drone capabilities, cooperation between Moscow and Beijing is allowing Russian forces to keep pace with Ukrainian innovations while China gains the opportunity to test its wares under combat conditions. Although the threat of increased Western sanctions continues to place constraints on their “no limits” partnership, Russia and China are moving forward with several joint projects — and former U.S. military officers are concerned about Washington’s will to stop them.

• 1.Kill the constellation
• 2.The secret negotiations
• 3.A joint air- and missile-defense project
• 4.Russian combat experience for Chinese technology
• 5.“A wake-up call”

A joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde.

By the fall of 2023, Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet network, had become a primary means of communication on the Ukrainian battlefield. Medics used its terminals to coordinate evacuations, artillery crews to correct their fire, and drone operators to fly in real time. “Starlink is now actually the blood of our entire communications infrastructure,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s then-minister of digital transformation and now its defense minister, said that September. As of November, SpaceX had delivered more than 40,000 terminals to Ukraine, and the system had grown so central to the country’s war effort that U.S. officials described it as irreplaceable.

That same month, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, engineers from China’s most important space and defense institutions gathered for a secret meeting. One of the items on their agenda was how to destroy Starlink, a prized possession in Elon Musk’s expansive business empire, which awkwardly straddles a geopolitical divide. SpaceX is the Pentagon’s most important space contractor, responsible for building and carrying U.S. spy satellites into orbit, while the U.S. government-run Starshield, the hard variant of Starlink, ensures resilient military connectivity. Meanwhile, Tesla, Musk’s electric car company, whose largest factory is in Shanghai, is heavily reliant on Chinese state loans and the indulgence of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Insider, together with Der Spiegel, and Le Monde, has obtained a cache of documents containing previously undisclosed details about the growing military cooperation between Russia and China. They consist of four slide show presentations delivered in November 2023 at the Third China-Russia Military-Technical Cooperation Forum in Guangzhou, a recurring bilateral gathering that has never been publicized, and a signed bilateral working protocol from negotiations held in Moscow in June 2023. The material spans five weapons domains: space weapons and the destruction of satellites, integrated air and missile defense, autonomous “swarm” loitering munitions, next-generation armored vehicles, and military aviation.

Taken together, the documents expose China’s professed neutrality in Russia’s ongoing war of conquest in Ukraine as a fiction. Instead, they show a partnership that has moved well beyond shared rhetoric into a structured, multi-disciplinary program to build weapons neither country could develop alone — reaching into the most sensitive strategic systems.

The documents show a partnership that has moved well beyond shared rhetoric into a structured, multi-disciplinary program to build weapons neither country could develop alone

An anonymous source first passed documents to Der Spiegel more than a year ago, with a brief note: “Russian-Chinese military cooperation is developing, even if China denies it.” Months of joint investigative reporting followed.

“The findings about the considerable extent of Chinese support for the Russian military are extremely worrying,” German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul told Der Spiegel. “China must know that this violates the absolute core of European security interests.” In the delegates’ own telling, America had “enclosed China and Russia in a C-shape,” with 550 F-35 stealth jets stationed in Europe and Washington “continuously escalating” the threat.

Kill the constellation

The Guangzhou documents include a presentation devoted entirely to countering Starlink. Although it is bilingual, the many obvious errors in the Russian text leave no doubt it was prepared by the Chinese side. The slideshow was delivered by two researchers from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC): Huang Hui (黄辉) and Ren Jie (任杰). CASC is China’s principal state space contractor, responsible for the Changzheng (“Long March”) rocket family and much of the country’s military satellite infrastructure. The document is marked “internal” — one level above material cleared for public release.

The presentation opens by tracing Starlink’s evolution from commercial broadband into networked military infrastructure: a navigation backup when GPS is degraded, a platform for high-precision persistent surveillance, and, above all, a distributed architecture. That last feature is what makes the system so hard to suppress. There is no central transmitting node, so jamming one ground station or destroying one relay does not meaningfully degrade the network. It is elastic.

Starlink's distributed architecture is what makes the system so hard to suppress: there is no central transmitting node, so jamming one ground station or destroying one relay does not meaningfully degrade the network

The CASC researchers recast that resilience as a threat. Starlink, they argue, has already imposed a “space blockade,” packing low-Earth orbit and key bands of the electromagnetic spectrum so densely as to foreclose competition — a framing that lets the authors present an assault on the network as self-defense rather than aggression.

Their answer is a three-level escalation ladder.

• Level one involves joint legal and diplomatic pressure. Starlink’s satellite density sharply raises the risk of collisions in low orbit, the authors argue, and so Moscow and Beijing should build an international coalition to win regulatory limits on the constellation’s expansion.
• Level two seeks to block Starlink’s access to the physical space it needs in order to expand. China and Russia would jointly file for critical frequency bands and orbital slots, using their weight in international regulatory bodies to obstruct the future deployment of Musk’s company. The document explicitly describes this step as a coordinated military countermeasure. Alongside it, the researchers propose a joint electromagnetic-jamming architecture (“power suppression and adaptive interference”) to selectively block Starlink in chosen geographic areas, merging the two countries’ separate anti-satellite programs into a single system with common technical standards and complementary coverage.
• Level three entails the physical destruction of Musk’s satellite network. The document proposes starting with cyber war — “access spoofing, virus infection, and the exploitation of vulnerabilities” to push malware through end-user terminals and propagate it across the network, thereby “paralyzing” it. Next comes the elimination of the satellites themselves via “low-cost” one-to-many countermeasures capable of destroying Starlink satellites in orbit — if the constellation’s resilience comes from its numbers, the answer is a weapon cheap enough to knock out satellites faster than SpaceX can launch replacements. The slide doesn’t specify what type of weapon this might be, although it could theoretically consist of a single rocket munition that disburses clouds of high-density projectiles such as ball bearings, if not a single launch vehicle that releases hundreds of low-cost, shoebox-sized CubeSats, which could ram into Starlink satellites. The accompanying image on this action item simply shows a host of satellites shattered into hunks of floating space debris in low-Earth orbit.

The presentation says nothing about the humanitarian cost of taking down a network relied upon by aid organizations, remote hospitals, journalists in conflict zones, and fishing fleets in dozens of countries. Instead, the documents urge the two countries to pursue all three tracks jointly and to widen the coalition, drawing in “relevant interested countries” to what it openly calls a technical alliance against Starlink.

There are signs the plans have advanced considerably since the 2023 conference.

In China, publications linked to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have discussed concrete combat scenarios involving laser weapons and anti-satellite missiles. This past February, Chinese media reported that researchers at the Northwest Institute of Nuclear Technology in Xi’an had built a powerful ground-based microwave weapon capable of targeting satellites in low orbit.

On the Russian side, NATO intelligence services are tracking a concept in which clouds of small pellets would be released into the constellation’s orbit to shred the satellites’ solar panels — while also endangering every other satellite in their path, Chinese ones included. A more precise Russian device, dubbed “Volna Kupol Garant,” can reportedly jam Starlink receivers on the ground within a radius of about 16 kilometers.

“We have redundancies if we lose the Starlink network, but shooting down its satellites would clearly degrade our defensive capabilities,” a senior U.S. intelligence official told The Insider, adding that loss of the system would hit counter-drone operations, communications, and long-range one-way attack drones alike.

A U.S. Army officer who recently served in the Middle East as part of Operation Epic Fury and spoke on the condition of anonymity said that commercial Starlink terminals bought off-the-shelf in Dubai were “100 percent critical to our military effort. Together with the Ukrainians, we attached them to practically every drone we fired at the Iranians. The commercial variants were a lot cheaper than Starshield.”

The secret negotiations

Five months before Guangzhou, a Chinese military delegation led by a colonel of the Central Military Commission spent nine days in Moscow holding secret talks with Russia’s leading air-defense manufacturer, Almaz-Antey. They left with an arms contract.

The resulting working protocol — obtained by The Insider and independently corroborated by the flight records of the participants it names — shows a partnership that has hardened into a structured, multi-track weapons program. Ten pages in Chinese and Russian, signed in Moscow on June 5, 2023, and titled simply “Working Protocol,” the document concerns the joint development of an integrated, low-altitude, terminal-phase air- and missile-defense system designed to intercept American hypersonic missiles.

The signed working protocol (Moscow, June 5, 2023)

Flight data reviewed by The Insider confirms that the Chinese participants named in the document arrived in Moscow on precisely the days the protocol was signed.

Nine of these sixteen officials flew together from Beijing to Moscow on the morning of the first day of the talks (May 28, 2023) under a single joint reservation, PNR PET88V, on Air China flight CA909. Their names on the ticket exactly match the delegation list in Appendix 1 to the protocol: Qu Xiaoguang (屈晓光), chief designer at the Academy of Defense Technology of the Chinese Academy of Armaments; Liu Jiandong (刘建东), deputy director; Guo Feng (郭峰), Huang Xiaofei (黄晓飞), Ren Minghao (任明浩), Zhang Baocheng (张保成), Duan Wei (段巍), Chang Chao (常超), and Cai Mingchun (蔡明春). A tenth official, Zhao Tingting (赵婷婷), Deputy Director of the Academy, flew in on the same flight under a separate reservation. They returned together on June 6-7, the day after the protocol was signed.

The Chinese delegation was led by Colonel Tong Xiaofeng, deputy director of the technical-cooperation bureau within the Central Military Commission’s Equipment Development Department — a senior PLA procurement official with direct access to China’s highest military body. The Commission, chaired by Xi Jinping himself, is a black box even to China specialists; in recent months it has been convulsed by an unprecedented purge, with only two of the seven members named at the 2022 party congress still in place. Tong appears to have been spared. He arrived in Moscow on May 25 to prepare and flew out on June 3, two days before the signing.

On their fifth day in Russia, the delegation visited the Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Design (NIIP) in Zhukovsky, southeast of Moscow — the organization responsible for the “Belka” radar of the Su-57 fighter and for core components of Russia’s newest air-defense systems. The visit is logged in the protocol without further detail, though the guests recorded “their gratitude for the warm and open reception.”

The Russian delegation consisted of twelve officials from three organizations: Rosoboronexport, Almaz-Antey, and NPO Almaz. It was led by Andrei Kovalev, deputy director of Rosoboronexport’s research-and-technology department, accompanied by senior expert Alexander Kotelnikov. Also present was Almaz-Antey’s Pavel Sozinov, the most experienced weapons designer in Russia’s air-defense establishment, responsible for the entire S-300/S-400/S-500 line. On the Chinese side, the signature of Rong Xiaoyang — the Russia representative of the U.S.-sanctioned China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation, maker of the FD-2000 surface-to-air system — appears throughout.

A joint air- and missile-defense project

At the center of the program is a next-generation integrated air- and missile-defense system built to intercept ballistic missiles, maneuvering reentry vehicles, and hypersonic missiles in their terminal phase. The performance targets — upgraded since the previous meeting and fixed precisely in the protocol — define the system’s ambitions: to intercept medium-range ballistic missiles at ranges up to 4,000 kilometers (raised in Moscow from 3,500), to handle targets accelerating laterally at a g-force of up to 25 (raised from 20 g), and to engage hypersonic missiles at altitudes up to 40 kilometers (up from 30).

The 25 g requirement is aimed squarely at the evasive flight profiles that make hypersonic weapons so difficult for existing systems to intercept, while the 40-kilometer ceiling reaches into near space, where hypersonic glide vehicles operate. In the West, only the most modern variant of the American Patriot — PAC-3 — can do that. The planned system would surpass everything currently fielded by the Russian army, including the S-500 “Prometheus,” in development since 2010.

The planned system would surpass everything currently fielded by the Russian army, including the S-500 “Prometheus,” in development since 2010

A first phase would jointly research the core technologies: cross-domain missile design integrating air defense, missile defense, and near-space intercept; combined command and control of ground, air, and electronic-warfare assets; and automated control of multi-role missiles in multi-service combat. Physical prototypes would be built to validate them. The protocol also records agreement on a second, parallel project — “Design and Operational Evaluation of Advanced Air- and Missile-Defense Systems” — whose draft terms of reference have already been initialed.

The protocol lays out a precise schedule, and the parties kept to it. Russia was to deliver a draft contract and commercial offer by August 2023; that month, a Russian delegation flew to Beijing.

In August 2023, Kotelnikov and Dmitry Kustov, head of JSC Technodinamika (which is subject to sanctions for the production of military aircraft), flew together from Moscow to Beijing, arriving on Aug. 12 and returning on Aug. 19. Zhao Tingting, deputy director of CASIC, who was part of the Chinese delegation in May, flew from Beijing to Moscow on Aug. 13 and returned on Aug. 17.

Contract talks were set for the fourth quarter of 2023 in Beijing; on December 17, 2023, Kovalev and Kotelnikov — the two most senior Russian signatories — flew there together.

The meetings have continued, with the fourth forum convening in December 2024 in Yekaterinburg.

Pavel Alekseevich Sozinov (born Oct. 26, 1959), Chief Designer of Almaz-Antey

That gathering offers a measure of how these forums operate.

On December 10, 2024, around eighty delegates convened in Sevastyanov House, a landmark mansion on Yekaterinburg’s city pond. Plenary sessions filled a columned hall, VIP talks were held in a room with a fireplace, and delegation heads lunched separately from everyone else. An internal Rosoboronexport letter dictated the dress code — winter uniform for military personnel, suits and ties for civilians — and ordered any misplaced conference passes reported at once. The gathering, officially dubbed the Russian-Chinese Forum for Military and Technical Cooperation, was shrouded in absolute secrecy. There were no interviews, and no sharing of information of any kind. Even the program brochure was to be handed back at the close of the proceedings. Although the December 2024 gathering was the fourth of its kind to be held annually since 2020, its existence has remained unknown to anyone without a security clearance.

That Russia would share this class of technology at all is newsworthy in itself. “This is the holy of holies — something that neither Russia nor the Soviet Union ever wanted to share,” said Pavel Luzin of the Saratoga Foundation, an American nonprofit that educates policymakers on the strategic threats posed by Russia and China. “Now Russia is nevertheless prepared to do so.”

“This is the holy of holies — something that neither Russia nor the Soviet Union ever wanted to share. Now Russia is nevertheless prepared to do so”

Air-defense systems and early-warning radars had long been reserved for Russia’s own use. Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, reads the project as an effort to intercept weapons like the U.S. Army’s new ground-launched hypersonic missile early in flight, shielding both countries from American long-range precision strikes. Such a system, he noted, would likely be designed to enter service around 2030.

The documents do not reveal the project’s course after 2023, but its continuation is hard to doubt. According to databases analyzed by Der Spiegel, a Chinese chief engineer surnamed Zhao made at least eight further flights between Beijing and Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport between late 2023 and June 2025, while Kovalev flew more than ten times between Russia and China — to both Beijing and Hong Kong — through January 2025.

Russian combat experience for Chinese technology

If the air-defense project is the partnership’s most sensitive strand, the documents also lay bare its central bargain: Russian battlefield experience in exchange for Chinese technology.

A presentation by Li Rong of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences proposes formalizing that trade around loitering munitions. China fields 160 types from more than fifty manufacturers, yet it has almost no real combat experience with any of them. Russia, however, has extensive battlefield data. The proposal calls for Russia to share what it has learned at the front while China contributes AI and mass-production capacity as the two powers jointly develop the next generation of autonomous “swarm” munitions. The results are already visible in Ukraine. According to Ukrainian military-intelligence documents from 2025, the V2U autonomous drone now used by Russian forces runs on Chinese AI modules, Chinese lidar sensors, Chinese batteries, and Chinese solid-state drives. As the Guangzhou participants discussed, Chinese engineering is, in effect, being combat-tested in Ukraine.

A second presentation, by Chen Wang of the China North Vehicle Research Institute, dissects armored warfare. It offers a detailed assessment of Russian vehicles destroyed in Ukraine — by Javelins, NLAWs, TB-2 drones, HIMARS, and Switchblade 600s — as the basis for a jointly developed next-generation armored vehicle with AI-driven active protection, uncrewed turrets, and integrated drone swarms.

The slides also dwell admiringly on the West’s newest tanks, from the Abrams-X to Rheinmetall’s Panther. The speaker’s notes are blunt about the constraint: facing “sanctions, especially the current restrictions on chips and raw materials,” China and Russia should use each other’s supply channels to break “bottlenecks” — China providing chips and electronics, Russia the raw materials and components Beijing struggles to obtain due to Western sanctions.

A third presentation, by Yu Wu of AVIC’s First Aircraft Institute, turns to aviation — and marks a reversal. China no longer appears as a buyer. The talk is of joint laboratories, shared intellectual property, and mutual technology transfer. China, it states plainly, has “the capability and the desire to contribute to the development of Russian aviation technology.”

The country that spent thirty years buying blueprints of Russian fighters is now offering Russia something to learn.

“The most interesting thing about these slides is that it’s the Chinese seeking Russia’s help,” a former U.S. Air Force officer told The Insider. “Usually it’s the other way around.”

“The most interesting thing about these slides is that it’s the Chinese seeking Russia’s help. Usually it’s the other way around”

“A wake-up call”

The forums are only the visible frame of a much larger effort. Beijing’s support of the Russian war effort turns out to be significantly greater than was previously known: Chinese experts have advised Russia on building a factory for the mass production of kamikaze drones and have helped construct a network that lets Russian troops at the front reach the internet after Starlink cut off service to unregistered users located on Ukrainian territory in early 2026, effectively disabling the terminals formerly used by occupying Russian soldiers.

Starlink was first provided to Kyiv days after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, but in September of that year Musk took the decision to deny the Ukrainian military the use of his network to attack the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol with naval-borne drones, arguing his technology was “not meant to be involved in wars.” Russian forces illegally used the network for exactly that purpose, however, ultimately prompting political pressure for the company to deactivate hundreds of terminals used by them, a decision Musk publicly endorsed.

Nevertheless, the world’s first trillionaire has been outspoken in his praise of the Chinese government and its ruling CCP. He has cultivated close ties with Li Qiang, formerly the Shanghai party secretary and now second most powerful official behind Xi. In 2023, Musk professed himself “kind of pro-China” and described Taiwan as an “integral part” of the country, likening the autonomous archipelago to Hawaii's relationship with the United States.

Musk has given no indication he’s aware that the same government he flatters has connived with Russia to destroy one of his most prized assets.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

The slides dedicated to countering Starlink mention the network’s effectiveness in Ukraine as the proving ground of its military applications, from “reconnaissance surveillance capability,” which gives Kyiv an “asymmetric intelligence advantage,” to “high-reliability navigation positioning service,” which offers a "combat advantage.” The Chinese are therefore encouraging greater integration with Russia on the premise of Russia’s faltering war, now in its fifth year, with roughly 1.4 million Russian casualties.

The Chinese are encouraging greater integration with Russia on the premise of Russia’s faltering war, now in its fifth year, with roughly 1.4 million Russian casualties

Nor is the attempt to take down Starlink and integrate strategic air defenses the extent of the military collaboration between Russia and China. Beyond training frontline Russian operators on Chinese drones — at least 200 of them at six sites in China, according to Der Spiegel — additional agreements approved at the highest level cover mutual troop training and exercises, with individual Chinese observers said to have appeared alongside Russian units near the zero line in Ukraine. In mid-June, EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas said the bloc had verified reports that China was responsible for training hundreds of Russian soldiers.

All of it makes China’s claim of neutrality untenable. “China is trying to project an appearance of neutrality,” said Alexander Gabuev, head of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. “Officially the message is: we are not involved, we help both sides. But de facto there is no neutrality.”

Shooting Starlink: The “no limits”war pact between Russia and China is taking aim at Elon Musk

The Insider World

Russia’s dependence on its eastern partner has only deepened. “Even when weapons say ‘Made in Russia,’ they carry Chinese components — at least the ones with electronics,” military expert Luzin said.

Additionally, without Chinese deliveries of semiconductors and the machine tools to produce them — technology Russia once sourced from Germany, now off-limits under sanctions — “Russia would not have been able to sustain its defense industry over the past four years,” explained Harvard researcher Dmitry Gorenburg.

Without Chinese deliveries of semiconductors and the machine tools to produce them, Russia would not have been able to sustain its defense industry over the past four years

For all that dependence, Russia holds one bleak advantage. China has not fought a war since 1979, while Russia has been waging one for more than four years at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. It can bring that battlefield experience into the partnership.

The cooperation is a source of concern in European capitals. When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz traveled to Beijing in February 2026, he pressed Xi directly on Chinese support for Russia’s war. Xi initially deflected, and Merz returned to it. Merz has said publicly that exactly three people could end the war almost overnight: Putin, Trump, and Xi. “Every act of support for Russia’s violation of international law prolongs the war and creates only further immeasurable suffering,” Wadephul told Der Spiegel, adding that in talks with its EU partners, Berlin would raise the issue of Beijing’s assistance to Moscow.

In Washington, as the true shape of the Moscow-Beijing “no limits” partnership comes into view, the alarm is only beginning to register. “It’s a wake-up call this administration better figure out,” former CIA officer Ed Bogan told The Insider. “They have contorted themselves to look the other way on Russian perfidy, and administration missionaries like Musk have at best looked the other way on China, and at worst praised them. These people fundamentally misunderstand the world they live in, and the real extent of their power.”

The next “secret” Russo-Chinese military forum — the sixth — is scheduled for the end of 2026, in St. Petersburg.

See also

• Tightening loopholes: Russia finally sees sharp drop in restricted industrial imports propping up its military-industrial complex
• "How much are drone coils these days?": The Insider and Nordsint go undercover to reveal how Chinese firms supply Russia’s defense industry
• One belt, one Donbas: China is gaining a foothold in Russian-occupied Ukraine
• The GRU’s Hogwarts: Inside Bauman University’s Department 4, an elite spy school for Russian military intelligence
• Geraniums in bloom: The Insider and Nordsint reveal how a large Chinese firm supplies Russian drone production