via @milinfolive

Of the really interesting things Sergei Shoigu said yesterday at a conference were the plans to create an all-weather remote sensing satellite system in the interests of the Russian Defense Ministry.

By the time the full-scale hostilities started in Ukraine, the Russian orbital constellation had only a few remote sensing satellites of the Kanopus-B type capable of providing at least some acceptable resolution of imagery and only one satellite with adequate resolution (Resurs-P). By comparison, western remote sensing satellite constellations not only had many times as many modern satellites, but they were also far superior to their Russian counterparts in resolution.

This caused the Russian army to fall behind in acquiring high-quality images of Ukraine’s territory in a timely manner using its own resources and forced it to look for workarounds to obtain materials from Western ERS satellites. Western countries, in turn, could afford to keep several RS satellites simultaneously over Ukrainian territory and Russian border areas (not counting military ones) in order to receive promptly the required images in high resolution and share them with the Armed Forces of Ukraine. This role of Western satellite intelligence in the success of Ukrainian counterattacks was repeatedly stated in the world press. In addition, many times we observed that the West photographed strategic Russian facilities before the subsequent attack by the AFU and then, after the strikes, repeatedly photographed them to confirm the result.

Despite the fact that at the moment the system announced by the Russian Minister of Defense is only at the stage of experimental development without providing a specific timeframe, it is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. It is obvious that this constellation most probably will not have time to be deployed in this conflict, but if such plans are implemented, Russia will get its own constellation of remote sensing satellites in sufficient numbers and with good resolution of imagery.