In March 2026, a Russian communications satellite called Express-AT1 failed in orbit, beyond repair. Satellite failures happen; the industry has a standard playbook for them — lease replacement capacity from another operator while a new spacecraft is built. What made this failure instructive was that the playbook no longer existed. Sanctions meant no Western operator could sell the capacity, no Western manufacturer could supply the replacement quickly, and the state broadcaster built to beam Moscow’s narrative into occupied Ukraine simply went dark, with nothing to be done. Four years after the full-scale invasion, the sanctions regime had reached geostationary orbit — not by touching a single entry in the ITU’s registers, but by removing every input that converts registered rights into working systems.
That distinction — the register untouched, the value destroyed — is the whole subject of this article, and it is worth careful attention from anyone who holds, finances or coordinates with spectrum assets, because the Russian case is the first full-scale experiment in what this asset class does under conditions of enmity.
The naive question: can spectrum be frozen?
When sanctions descend, the instinctive question from financiers is the yacht question: can the asset be frozen, seized, confiscated? For spectrum, the answer is structurally no, and understanding why illuminates what the asset actually is.
Spectrum rights exist as recognitions in a treaty system — filings and recorded assignments held by national administrations at the ITU, a United Nations specialised agency. Sanctions are national and plurilateral instruments; the register is universal. Russia remains an ITU member state in good standing, its administration continues to file, notify and defend its networks, and no mechanism exists — none was ever designed — for suspending a member’s filings or expelling it from the queue. The Radio Regulations contemplate networks failing their deadlines; they do not contemplate their holders becoming pariahs. Contrast the fate of physical assets in the same conflict: leased Western aircraft trapped in Russia were seized and brazenly re-registered under the Russian flag, a stroke-of-a-pen conversion of possession into paper. Nothing analogous is possible in either direction for spectrum. Russia could seize the thirty-six OneWeb satellites stranded at Baikonur in 2022 — hardware is seizable — but neither Russia nor the West can seize, re-register or extinguish the other’s frequencies. The register is, by design, sanctions-proof.
What the past four years demonstrate is that this formal immunity is close to worthless, because everything around the register is exposed.
What sanctions actually hit
Trace the inputs a registered right needs to become and remain a working, valuable system, and you have the map of where the pressure landed.
Manufacturing. Export controls severed Russian operators from Western payloads and components almost overnight — the flagship consequence being RSCC, the state GEO operator, forced into a crash import-substitution programme, contracting all-domestic spacecraft and conceding publicly that domestic manufacturers deliver more slowly than the pre-war supply chain, with a bandwidth shortage the foreseeable result. A right whose replacement satellite arrives years late is a right ageing towards its suspension limits.
Insurance and money. Underwriters withdrew or imposed what Russian operators themselves described as a discriminatory regime; payment channels collapsed with the banking sanctions, disrupting the mundane plumbing — receiving revenue, paying suppliers, even settling ITU invoices through sanctioned banks — on which the maintenance of any portfolio runs.
Substitution. The Express-AT1 episode: the leasing market, the industry’s shock absorber, closed to Russian counterparties. An asset class’s resilience lives in its secondary arrangements — capacity leases, hosted payloads, partner fleets — and sanctions switch them off selectively.
Market access. The most immediate and public front: European institutions banned the distribution of RT and Sputnik within weeks of the invasion and extended the lists repeatedly through 2024; the UK revoked RT’s broadcasting licence; European regulators ordered satellite operators to drop sanctioned Russian channels. Notice what this is: the enforcement layer this series keeps identifying — market access as orbit’s port-state control — operating at wartime speed. The filings that carried those broadcasts were never touched; the right to be received in the markets that mattered was simply withdrawn.
Institutions and people. Coordination is negotiation, and negotiation runs on meetings, travel and goodwill — all casualties. Formally, coordination correspondence with Russian networks continues through the ITU’s machinery; practically, the bilateral processes froze into paperwork exchanged without progress. Meanwhile the intergovernmental scaffolding of the Soviet-era system began shedding members: Poland formally terminated its participation in Moscow-headquartered Intersputnik at the end of 2024, with Ukraine following — a slow-motion unwinding of one of the register’s oldest collective portfolios, and a due-diligence event for every non-Russian operator whose services quietly ride on Intersputnik or Russian filings.
The clocks as executioner
Here the regime reveals its accidental elegance. The ITU cannot sanction Russia — but it does not need to, because the Radio Regulations already contain an impersonal enforcement mechanism: the clocks. Filings must be brought into use within seven years; assignments in use may be suspended for only limited periods before they lapse; constellation filings face the milestone regime’s deployment percentages. Every one of these deadlines assumes a functioning industrial base, launch cadence and capital supply. Sanctions attack exactly those assumptions — and then the clocks, neutral and automatic, do the executing. A delayed replacement satellite becomes a suspension window entered; a slowed constellation programme becomes milestones missed and a filing trimmed; ambitions like Russia’s planned multi-orbit constellation programme meet deployment schedules drawn for a supply chain that no longer exists. No tribunal rules against the sanctioned holder. Its paper simply, gradually, expires — while the paper of its adversaries, whose inputs remain intact, compounds in relative value.
This is the central analytical finding of the Russian experiment: spectrum rights are sanctions-resistant in form and sanctions-vulnerable in substance, and the transmission mechanism is time.
The institutional battlefield
The war also tested the regime’s political architecture, and the results deserve sober reading. Russia was not, and will not be, expelled from the ITU — but the membership delivered its verdict by other means: in the 2022 election for Secretary-General, the American candidate defeated her Russian opponent by an overwhelming margin, a proxy vote watched across the multilateral system, and Ukraine has pursued Russia through the available machinery with complaints over interference and broadcasting into occupied territory. The pattern matches the register: the institutions bend to the conflict without breaking their universality. For strategists, the implication cuts both ways. The regime’s inability to exclude is a genuine vulnerability — a state can wage war on its neighbour and keep filing on Monday — and simultaneously a load-bearing feature, because a regime that could expel members would place every portfolio in it at the mercy of shifting majorities.