If it’s true it would be an amazing selling point for SpaceX on just how rapidly they can deploy payloads. Militaries must love the idea of agile space operations.

Given the proliferation of anti-satellite weapons, agile launch capabilities have become just a basic requirement to win any high-end conflict. Satellites aren't survivable so we have to plan around a high level of attrition, with replacements stockpiled and ready to launch within days or hours.

Agile launch capabilities, but also cheap launch capabilities. Which is another area where SpaceX (comparatively) shines.

Western Aligned Militaries also have things like Global Hawk and stack and stacks of other toys that can fill a tactical surveillance niche.

Can always put in space sensitive equipment that you wouldn’t want shot down by “simple” surface to air weaponry and their technology exposed to the adversary.

There's like a big jump in platform cost and capability (downgrade) wise when you throw a satellite up. Putting a new ISTAR package on a drone is a lot cheaper than making changes to a satellite.

> short lead time

that russia may try to militarily annex eastern ukraine was rather obvious for many years. Ukraine sits between NATO and russia. A majority of its population had been in favor of joining the former. The eastern ukraine holds large reserves of natural resources and pro-russian separatists. The later are used as a casus belli for an ethno-nationalist anschluss. Lastly it is not like the 2014 war truly ever ended: there had been 410.000 cease fire violation in 2017 alone, for example.

They are "autonomists" not "separatists", what they were asking for and agreed on the two Minsk accords was "autonomy" not "independence". There's certain intentionality in painting them as separatists.

Geniune question:

¿Is there any difference in practice between "autonomy" and "se paration" in the context of governance here?

in a year the LPR and DNR will be seperated from ukraine and a part of Russia. This annexation has been planned and prepared for a long time. I agree that such conflicts are never easy and there are many small factions with different goals and beliefs on the ground, but claiming this is about autonomy is part of their casus belli: a construct in which the russian ethno-nationalists pretend they didn't ask for much and got nothing but abuse. In actuality the leadership of the LPR and DNR removed ukrainian both as an official language and from their schools curriculum years ago and started paying pensions in rubles. They advertised their plans very clearly and loudly, calling their intermediate construct "Новороссия" - new russia. It is like calling western czech "Sudetendeutschland". Their goal is not autonomy but unification with russia. Always has been. So calling them seperatists is quite fitting. But i agree the term may only describe a minority in the region, not the general population.

And given the potential orbit. It seems like if the goal was solely Ukraine/Russia they'd be using a Molniya orbit, or something similar that would spend more time over the area in question

It seems reasonable to me if you presume the hardware is loaded and ready to go, and all that's needed is to know exactly which orbit it needs to be put into.