Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, has once again reached for his favourite genre - the apocalypse in a single Telegram post. This time he warns that an attempt to destroy Russia's Rassvet satellite network would trigger open war in space with the United States.

Medvedev wrote that "blocking" Rassvet at the request of "the Kyiv idiot" can only mean destroying it, and that would lead to "a full-scale space war". Then he named Elon Musk's American network directly: "I hope the Americans understand that. Because then their low-orbit Starlink satellites would fall like ornaments from a dried-out Christmas tree." He added that space is "a very cramped place", which is why "mutual respect" is needed. That much is true - except respect rarely begins with a threat.

What Kyiv actually asked for

Medvedev was reacting after the British financial press reported that Volodymyr Zelensky had repeatedly asked Donald Trump for measures against Rassvet, including sanctions on Russian and Chinese companies involved in developing the system. Kyiv fears that a fully operational Russian satellite network could change the situation at the front - with a stable broadband link for Russian units, real-time data transfer and more reliable control of reconnaissance and strike drones. Ukrainian diplomat Denys Senyk warned that once the network is developed enough, Rassvet would let Russian forces transmit battlefield data almost instantly and aim weapons more precisely.

But Medvedev skipped over one detail. On 28 August Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha announced that Kyiv had formally approached the International Telecommunication Union, asking for Ukraine's territory to be excluded from Rassvet's declared coverage zones in all frequency bands. That is a regulatory request to an international organisation, not a missile aimed at orbit. From a letter to a UN agency to "space war" - that's the leap Medvedev made in a single post.

Russia is building its own network

Rassvet is being developed by the Russian company Bureau 1440 as a low-orbit broadband satellite communication system. The first 16 production satellites were sent into orbit on 23 March this year, and a second batch of 16 more was launched in July. Before them, Russia launched experimental satellites to test links between spacecraft and user terminals. Ukrainian military intelligence claims Russian forces have already managed to use the existing Rassvet satellites for several hours of communication over Ukraine. Moscow plans to expand the network to hundreds of satellites in the coming years, and the final plan envisages more than 900 spacecraft in low Earth orbit.

Anyone who has seen war up close knows it rarely stays where it started. In orbit that's literally true: a destroyed satellite doesn't disappear, it breaks up into a cloud of debris that circles the Earth for years and endangers every other satellite - including the navigation and communication satellites the whole world relies on, our region included. If the two powers start smashing each other's "ornaments" in the sky, who will pick up the pieces?