SpaceX's Starlink user terminals are being openly sold in Russia, though CEO Elon Musk has denied knowledge of any such sales in the country.
The terminals, which provide users with high-speed internet via the Starlink satellite constellation, are available on the Russian website of a reseller claiming to be an "official distributor" of leading Chinese drone maker DJI.
Musk sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine to provide internet coverage early in the war and later withheld the service during a Ukrainian surprise attack in Crimea, citing fear of a nuclear reprisal from Russia.
"Both Ukrainians and Russians are continuing to chew through vast quantities of DJI drones on the battlefield, despite massive misgivings about their reliance on Chinese tech," Faine Greenwood, a senior spatial data scientist with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, wrote in her blog last July.
The U.S. Department of Defense in 2022 added DJI to a blacklist of Chinese companies believed to have ties to China's People's Liberation Army.
The previous year, the Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control named DJI among eight Chinese tech firms deemed to be complicit in the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang.
The original article contains 553 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!