[gpm]

I doubt Belarus has the infrastructure to shoot them down, them asking Russia to and giving Russia the excuse that the US violated the Outer Space Treaty first might do the trick though. Depends on how much of a war monger Russia wants to be at the relevant point in time.

They are spread out with many satellites over a small number of orbits, pretty ideal for Kessler, or pretty ideal for another satellite to pass by a whole line of them and stick a bullet (small detachable impactor) in each.

[steve_musk]

Or some Russian hardware mysteriously is “stolen” and ends up in Belarus with some little green men to operate it.

Would they need to shoot down the entire constellation? I could imagine them threatening to shoot it down (and maybe a few demonstrations) would be enough to convince SpaceX to stop sending signals into Belarus.

[liability]

I dislike Putin, but I think he's too smart to start shooting down hundreds of American satellites (barring WWIII.) That's far brasher than anything else they've done in quite a while.