>>Have these guys surely heard of Satellite radios? I mean, they do have GLONASS. It could be used that way

Retired datacomms guy here. It's not at all clear that GLONASS (or GPS) sats have that capability. Sat radios typically communicate with either geostationary sats (fairly high orbit, always over the equator, uplink takes a *lot* of power, particularly at high latitudes) or sats in LEO that take a lot less power.
I'm not saying that the RF doesn't have comms sats in LEO, but I think we might know as having at least one in the sky over a particular spot of ground 24x7 takes a lot of sats, particularly if they need to cover the high latitudes.
BTW, Apple has, in the last couple of years made it possible to send a SOS message via sat, but that's very far from military comms. Worth looking into if you're going to be somewhere where help is far away and there's no cell signal. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/11/emergency-sos-via-satellite-made-possible-by-450m-apple-investment/
BTW2, if you've wondered about those little Hughes data dishes (geosynch so antenna on the ground just needs to be aimed once), uplink is via ground communication, usually something like a (slow!) phone modem, otherwise it's pretty much the same as Dishnet. It works because most consumer internet usage is highly asymmetyrical (small requests, big responses).