The revelation follows allegations Russian forces are deploying Starlink in their invasion of Ukraine, now in its third year. DJI says it forbids distributors from selling its products in instances of suspected combat end-use. In April 2022, the tech firm announced it was temporarily suspending business in both Russia and Ukraine pending “compliance assessments.”
“We can confirm that this is not an official DJI website,” a company representative said when asked about the Starlink sales.
DJI said its legal team was looking into possible copyright infringement.
Representatives of the purported distributor, djirussia.ru, did not respond to a request for comment.
Starlink’s Elon Musk has categorically denied Starlink sales are happening in Russia.
[Edit typo.]
This is the best summary I could come up with:
SpaceX’s Starlink user terminals are being openly sold in Russia, though CEO Elon Musk has denied knowledge of any such sales in the country.
The terminals, which provide users with high-speed internet via the Starlink satellite constellation, are available on the Russian website of a reseller claiming to be an “official distributor” of leading Chinese drone maker DJI.
Musk sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine to provide internet coverage early in the war and later withheld the service during a Ukrainian surprise attack in Crimea, citing fear of a nuclear reprisal from Russia.
“Both Ukrainians and Russians are continuing to chew through vast quantities of DJI drones on the battlefield, despite massive misgivings about their reliance on Chinese tech,” Faine Greenwood, a senior spatial data scientist with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, wrote in her blog last July.
The U.S. Department of Defense in 2022 added DJI to a blacklist of Chinese companies believed to have ties to China’s People’s Liberation Army.
The previous year, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control named DJI among eight Chinese tech firms deemed to be complicit in the surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in the western region of Xinjiang.
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