Minimize to nav In recent days, there has been a smattering of coverage in state-run Russian media outlets about how the Belarusian army has developed its own satellite Internet service akin to SpaceX's Starlink constellation, called "Kulisa." According to the TASS news service, for example, the Kulisa mobile communications technology has "already entered service and is being used in military units of the Armed Forces." And Pravda, which started out as the official newspaper of Russia's Communist Party more than a century ago, taunted the developer of the technology, saying, "How's that for you, SpaceX?" This is a curious bit of propaganda, because Belarus, an Eastern European nation that is subservient to Russia and located just north of Ukraine, does not actually have a space program that launches rockets or builds satellites. Rather, the 15-year-old Belarus Space Agency sometimes collaborates with Russia and China on various space projects. By contrast, the SpaceX-built Starlink Internet constellation consists of more than 7,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit—the product of hundreds of launches—that employ sophisticated laser-link communications and a network of ground stations around the world to provide low-latency broadband Internet from space. What Kulisa really is So what's going on here? Images of the "Kulisa" setup do not look particularly mobile and consist of some boxy hardware. A report from the Ukraine-based United24 Media also shows a conventional satellite dish, akin to a DirectTV satellite dish in the United States. Commercial providers have offered Internet from geostationary satellites since the 1990s, but it has been relatively slow, with high latency due to the distance signals must travel (36,000 km, 22,000 miles) to reach the satellites and back. Accordingly, Belarus' Starlink analog appears to be based on decades-old technology that is largely unsuited for the rigors of a mobile military unit. But perhaps for Alexander Lukashenko, Belarus' first and only president (since 1994), it is effective propaganda to tell his people that they have Starlink technology, too. Starlink is not available in Belarus, but the Internet service has been used by the Ukrainian military for communications since the Russian invasion in February 2022. This has aggravated Russian officials, who have suggested the Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit are "legitimate" military targets.