This is the script for my video posted on October 12, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
A typical geostationary satellite orbits the Earth roughly over the equator. But a lot of Russian military and intelligence satellites fly very strange orbits that linger far above the Arctic. So why do Russian satellites operate like this, and what impact does it have on geopolitics?
In the early Cold War as rockets became more powerful and reliable, the US and the Soviet Union began to realize that they could not only be used to deliver weapons, but to launch things into orbit.
Up to that point, the world had relied on aircraft and balloons to see things from above, but satellites gave massive advantages. They could stay up far longer than any aircraft, and they could pass over enemy territory without violating the country’s sovereignty, a norm that took hold when nobody protested the first satellite passing overhead in 1957.
But the Soviets had a problem. Most of their territory sat at very high latitudes, meaning that geostationary satellites, which loiter over the equator, would hang very low on the horizon, and above about 81 degrees north they wouldn’t be in contact with them at all.
Soviet launch sites were also far enough north that reaching an orbit over the equator required a costly maneuver to reach the right orbital plane, and in the early 1960s Soviet rockets didn’t have that kind of power to spare.
At the same time, the Soviet Union needed satellites that could serve the northern hemisphere. At first that meant carrying television, phone, and military communications across the country’s eleven time zones, and later it meant watching for missiles rising out of US silos.
The solution was clever. They would launch satellites into a long, stretched-out orbit that swings low over the southern hemisphere and then climbs to nearly 40000 kilometers over the north, where it slows down and lingers for about eight hours at a time.
Tilting that orbit at about 63.4 degrees keeps Earth’s bulging equator from dragging the high point south over time. Unlike an orbit over the equator, they could also reach that tilt straight from their own launch sites, like Baikonur in modern Kazakhstan or Plesetsk in the far north of western Russia. That meant no expensive maneuvers were required, cutting down on fuel costs and allowing heavier payloads.
This is called a Molniya orbit, which translates to lightning, and it’s a specific type of what’s more broadly called a Highly Elliptical, or HEO, orbit. Molniya satellites orbit the Earth every twelve hours. But they also have a less common cousin called the Tundra orbit, which reaches about 7000 kilometers higher at its peak and orbits every 24 hours.
There are tradeoffs to these orbits though. For one thing, Molniya orbits cross through the Van Allen radiation belts twice per revolution, or four times per day. This bombardment from high-energy electrons and protons causes damage to onboard electronics and solar panels that accumulates over time. That’s one reason Molniya satellites tend to have shorter lifespans than geostationary ones, even with heavy radiation hardening.
Because these satellites are always moving across the sky, ground station antennas need to be steered to stay in contact. Over time, the gravity of the Sun and the Moon also pulls each satellite out of its intended orbit unless it burns fuel to correct. And you need at least three satellites in Molniya orbit to keep continuous 24-hour coverage over the far north.
In 1971, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Hot Line Modernization Agreement to make sure the nuclear hot line would actually work during a crisis by adding satellite links. The US provided one communications circuit via the international Intelsat system, while the Soviets used their Molniya II system.
In the 1970s, the Soviets also started putting satellites into Molniya orbit with sensors that could detect a missile motor in flight against the background of space. The orbit allowed them to view US missile fields at a low, grazing angle for that purpose, across the edge of the planet’s horizon.
This came into play in 1983 during the famous incident in which a single Soviet Lieutenant Colonel is often credited with averting a nuclear war. Stanislav Petrov was on duty at the secret Serpukhov-15 command center outside Moscow when the early warning satellite system reported, at its highest level of confidence, that the US had just launched five ICBMs.
Kosmos 1382, a satellite launched the year before into Molniya orbit, was just reaching the highest part of its orbit, the apogee. The Soviet investigation later concluded that sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds had lined up with the satellite’s view in an unusual way and made it see things that weren’t there.
In the moment, though, Petrov famously reasoned that no one would start a war with just five missiles, and he chose to classify the alert as a system malfunction. There were several more layers of command between him and any retaliation, but Petrov’s reasoning stopped escalation in its tracks.
Even before that, in 1979, the Soviets had ordered a true look-down system that could see launches against the Earth’s surface, including submarine launches at sea. Those satellites sat in geostationary orbit, and they didn’t start going up until 1991. Over the following decades both constellations wore out, until the last working satellites failed in 2014 and Russia lost its entire satellite-based early warning capability. The first replacement went up in late 2015, but it took several more years before Russia had enough of them for continuous satellite coverage again.
Today Russia has roughly ten satellites in Molniya orbits. Most handle missile early warning and secure military communications, and two are used to monitor Arctic weather. Confusingly, the current early warning satellites are called Tundra, but they actually fly Molniya orbits. Those same early warning satellites have also been implicated in disrupting GPS across Europe, Greenland, and Canada, sending out short bursts of interference that degrade GPS reception over huge areas.
But Russia doesn’t rely on its satellites nearly as much as the US, which flies its own satellites in Molniya orbits for signals intelligence, missile early warning, and communications relay. Instead, Russia leans more on its Voronezh early warning radar network.
But in 2024, Ukrainian drones struck a Voronezh radar site in southern Russia, proving their vulnerability, and though these face south rather than toward US missile flight paths over the Arctic, this is a tremendous problem because Russia’s satellites are too limited to cover the blind spots created by that kind of damage.
On top of that, the New START Treaty expired in February 2026, and on-site inspections had already stopped years earlier. In some ways, the world has entered a nuclear threat environment not seen since the Cold War. With Russia’s radar systems now within reach of Ukrainian drones, a lack of reliable satellite early warning could mean far more ambiguity during a crisis, which creates conditions ripe for miscalculation.
Russia itself has admitted that it has more than enough rockets to put new satellites up, but their nearly finished payloads are missing components due to sanctions.
Russia’s track record suggests it can only sustain a handful of these expensive satellites at a time, even once it gets them up. But like the US, it needs them to watch for missile launches. With Ukrainian drones now in play, Russia doesn’t seem to have any option other than simply eating the ambiguity.
Keep reading
- Why does the US still need nuclear command aircraft?
- Why couldn’t Ukraine keep its nuclear weapons?
- How has Russia’s relationship with Cuba changed since the Cold War?
I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.