A joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde has found that China’s proclaimed neutrality in Russia’s war on Ukraine conceals years of military-technical cooperation, structured around an explicit three-tier plan to disable Elon Musk’s Starlink network.
By fall 2023, Starlink had become Ukraine’s primary battlefield communications system, with over 40,000 terminals delivered by that November, when Chinese defense engineers met secretly in Guangzhou, per The Insider.
The plan escalates in tiers rather than a loose menu.
Tier one is regulatory sabotage: diplomatic protests against Starlink’s orbital footprint paired with joint spectrum and orbital-slot applications meant to block its expansion bureaucratically.
Tier two is offensive cyber activity against civilian terminals, using fabricated credentials and vulnerability exploitation to paralyze the network.
Tier three is kinetic attrition, physically destroying satellites faster than SpaceX can replace them.
The transactional logic is clearest in the drone program. At a December 2024 Yekaterinburg forum, China proposed an exchange: Russia’s combat data, the only large-scale autonomous-weapons dataset in existence, for Chinese AI technology and mass-production scale Moscow can’t replicate under sanctions, according to Meduza.
The result is already deployed: Ukrainian intelligence documents from 2025 show Russia’s V2U drone runs on Chinese AI modules, lidar, batteries, and solid-state drives, per The Insider.
That undercuts Beijing’s “non-lethal” framing, which draws a legal line around finished weapons while ignoring the sub-components, AI modules, sensors, and air-defense architecture that make them function.
Der Spiegel found at least 200 Russians trained on Chinese drones at six Chinese sites before returning to the Ukrainian front, and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas confirmed the bloc had verified that China trained hundreds of Russian soldiers.
Separate prior reporting, per UNITED24 Media, describes earlier Chinese CBRN-focused training, a distinct claim from Kallas’s figure.
Carnegie’s Alexander Gabuev told the investigation that this pattern makes China’s “we help both sides” posture untenable.
Maritime Administration
Der Spiegel reported German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul called the findings “extremely worrying,” and Berlin has summoned China’s ambassador.
Whether the Starlink plan has moved beyond the proposal isn’t established, but Chinese-built components are already flying in Russian drones against Ukraine.
