Despite numerous reports that the American company Maxar, one of the leading suppliers of high-quality satellite images, has completely banned access to their services from Ukraine, this information is not entirely true.
Defense Express contacted the official distributor of Maxar in Ukraine, the TVIS company, specializing in the commercial supply of images. TVIS claims that the ban did not affect authorized Ukrainian users of Maxar, who, as before, can order paid services from the American company. That is, to receive satellite images of any point on Earth, both Ukraine and the russian federation, for money.
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At the same time, TVIS emphasized that they deal only with commercial orders and do not have information about the supply of Maxar satellite data to the security forces of Ukraine financed by the U.S. government.
On a note from Defense Express, the first report about the lack of access to Maxar services came from the CyberBoroshno open-source intelligence (OSINT) community. Later, the activist group also confirmed that it was free access that was blocked.
At the time of publication, Maxar has not officially commented on the change in its policy. For a reminder, Maxar operates a constellation of remote sensing satellites which consists of 10 devices: WorldView-1, -2, and -3 (resolution from 31 to 50 cm per pixel), GeoEye-1 (41 cm per pixel), as well as six WorldView Legion units (34 cm per pixel).
Worth adding, Maxar is not a monopolist in the satellite imagery business. In particular, similar services are provided by the European Airbus, or the Finnish ICEYE and other companies. Besides, some countries have already publicly reiterated that they will continue to send their intelligence to Ukraine — for example, France, which has its own intelligence satellite constellation.
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