Ukraine drones fly with HiSKY terminals instead of Starlink, according to Russian channels

Instead of Starlink, the Ukrainian Armed Forces are now using terminals from the Israeli manufacturer HiSKY for their deep strikes. Russian military channels reported this on 6 November. Russian engineers believe this may explain why the recent, highly successful attacks by Ukraine drones on Russian refinery facilities were so effective.

There was neither a denial nor a confirmation from Serhiy Beskrestnov, who advises the Office of the President and is known as Flash.

🔥 Ukrainian defense forces used FP-1 drones to strike the Novokuibyshevsk oil refinery in Russia’s Samara region.
Multiple strikes hit the facility—which has an annual capacity of ~8.8 million tons—including its diesel hydrotreating unit. https://t.co/pwEAYM67ks— Fire Point (@FirePointUA) October 30, 2026

Flash commented on the reports as follows: “I do not confirm this information from the enemy, but I do not deny it either. I do not know why this is causing such a stir in the Russian media, because technologies like this have long ceased to be anything unique”

Ukraine has hit seven refineries within nine days since the end of October:

• Novokuibyshevsk refinery (Rosneft) on 30 October
• Bashneft-Novoi refinery in Ufa on 31 October
• Refinery in Kstovo (Lukoil) on 1 November
• Yaroslavl refinery (Slavneft-YANOS) on 3 November
• Ryazan refinery on 5 November
• Afipsky refinery in the Krasnodar region on 6 November
• Saratov refinery (Rosneft) on 7 November

Multiple hits on a single plant

Saratov processes 7 million tonnes of oil a year, producing 1.2 million tonnes of petrol and 1.9 million tonnes of diesel. Eyewitnesses there reported several separate seats of fire. OSINT analysts counted six of them: two exhaust gas cleaning units, a catalytic reformer, an ELOU-AVT unit, a vacuum distillation unit and a hydrotreating unit.

This is where these attacks differ decisively from earlier ones. Back then, a strike was usually aimed at a single, central object. Today, several drones from one and the same wave hit different parts of a plant at the same time.

Nightmares for the enemy, anyone? 👻 Crews from the 7th Deep Strike Center of Magyar’s Birds dressed up for Halloween. We work like ghosts: you can’t see us, but the enemy can’t sleep. https://t.co/qGWNkzNBjG— 414 Magyar’s Birds (@414magyarbirds) October 31, 2026

According to the analysis, the HiSKY terminals transmit telemetry data and make it possible to change route and target while still in flight. If a target has already been hit, the drone receives a new one from the control centre. If the interception rate on the main route is high, drones can be diverted to alternative routes. In this way a single attack achieves what used to take several flights. Repairing the damaged units is likely to be considerably more complex and protracted, and therefore more expensive.

The switch to HiSKY was triggered by the dispute over Starlink. In mid-October SpaceX throttled the service for Ukraine, hampering operations at the front. Elon Musk then accused Ukraine of misusing Starlink for offensive attacks. According to a BBC report, he wrote on X: “The use of Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people was never permitted and never should be”.

Presidential adviser Beskrestnov countered that in Ukraine drones using Starlink are limited to 70 to 90 km/h and do not work on Russian territory. On Telegram he wrote: “It is very strange that Elon Musk is not aware of the restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine”. The service was only restored when US President Donald Trump ordered it. Even so, Kyiv then stepped up its search for alternatives and now appears to have found a promising one.

HiSKY: founders, terminal and network

HiSKY was founded in 2015 by Shahar Kravitz (CEO), Yaron Shachar and Moti Litochevski, who had previously worked in Israeli defence, intelligence and telecommunications. Their development is a compact multi-orbit satellite terminal architecture for military and civilian platforms.

At the top of the Smartlite range is the terminal now named in the reports, the Smartlite Sirius 16×16 Ku. Measuring 42 by 604 by 290 millimetres, it weighs 6 kilograms and draws up to 105 watts. It has no rotating dish. Instead it carries a flat, electronically steered antenna with 256 radiating elements and a transmit/receive angle of up to 60 degrees. It transmits in the Ka and Ku bands and uses both geostationary and low Earth orbit satellites. Via GEO satellites, data rates of 7 to 2,000 kbit/s are possible. The device is manufactured in Italy. HiSKY promotes itself with the slogan “Private. Invisible. In Command.” and promises that detection and interception are unlikely.

HiSKY differs from Starlink above all in the architecture of its network. SpaceX operates several thousand low Earth orbit satellites of its own, which offer high bandwidth with low signal latency. HiSKY, by contrast, has only one satellite (Ella-1) and also runs a virtual satellite network (Satellite Virtual Network Operator/SVNO). The company leases the satellite capacity for this under agreements with other satellite operators. It is marketed as Forcelite for military applications and as Smartlite for industry and civilian users. Depending on the type, the terminals align with any commercial Ka- and Ku-band satellite whose beam covers the flight area. A cloud-based management system distributes the leased frequencies to the terminals.

The system therefore also works in the European part of Russia, where Starlink has no authorisation. The price is low speed and high latency. Flash explains: “Terminals of this type can indeed hold a connection while on the move, but this is not Starlink. The speed reaches 2 Mbit/s at most, and the signal latency via geostationary satellites is too high for online control”. For telemetry data, target corrections and compressed image data, that is still sufficient. With HiSKY, flight paths can be corrected and new target data for industrial facilities transmitted while the flight is still under way.

Ukraine drones less dependent on individual providers

HiSKY can therefore not be regarded as a full replacement for Starlink. OneWeb, too, is hardly a genuine alternative because of its smaller number of satellites and high orbital altitude. Nevertheless, the series of attacks since the end of October shows that Kyiv is making its long-range strikes less dependent on individual providers.

Russia, meanwhile, claims it can jam the Israeli HiSKY terminals with its Volna-Kupol-Garant electronic warfare system. HiSKY, for its part, explicitly points to its LPI/LPD technology (Low Probability of Interception/Detection). According to the manufacturer, data transmission is encrypted and optimised in such a way that an adversary can intercept or locate it only with great difficulty. HiSKY says it is also resistant to interference with global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) such as GPS jamming and spoofing (signal falsification).