The German government has been paying for Ukraine’s access to Eutelsat satellite-based internet services for about a year, Reuters reported, at a time when the EU is seeking greater independence from US defence strategies.

Ukraine’s primary satellite-based internet provider is Starlink, part of US aerospace company SpaceX, with about 50,000 Starlink terminals in Ukraine.

The number of Eutelsat terminals in the country is much smaller, at fewer than a thousand, said Eutelsat chief executive Eva Berneke.

German funding

Speaking at the company’s headquarters in Paris, she said the terminals have been in Ukraine for about a year, offered via a German distributor and paid for by the German government, without disclosing the cost.

Berneke said the company was expecting to deploy some 5,000 to 10,000 terminals to Ukraine “relatively fast”.

She said the new deployments could come “within weeks” but the company said funding for the move was still under discussion.

“We don’t know yet how the EU collectively or country by country will fund efforts going forward,” a Eutelsat spokeswoman told Reuters.

Eutelsat’s OneWeb is Starlink’s main competitor with low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites in the region, but its constellation of 650 satellites is less than one-tenth the size of Starlink’s.

The company said last month that it continued to operate “hundreds” of terminals across Ukraine and the Black Sea.

US president Donald Trump has taken a more hostile attitude toward Ukraine than his predecessor since taking office in January, most notably leading to a shouting match with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in early March.

Defence strategy

Such incidents have led the EU to prioritise greater defence independence from the United States amidst an ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia.

Starlink and SpaceX are headed by Elon Musk, a close Trump ally.

Last year Ukraine’s largest mobile operator Kyivstar said it began testing OneWeb technologies with the military as OneWeb’s official Ukraine partner.

In February OneWeb said it successfully used a LEO satellite to connect a broadband terminal with a core 5G network using a next-generation 5G protocol called Release 17.

Last October Eutelsat launched and deployed 20 OneWeb satellites into low-Earth orbit in its first launch since the OneWeb acquisition.

Eutelsat acquired the UK’s OneWeb in 2022.