Someone in the White House is crippling Ukraine’s access to military-grade Starlink terminals.
Leaders at the Department of Defense received an order from inside the White House to slow the Starshield satellite system that Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operations, two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter told Reuters Thursday.
A Ukrainian military official claimed Wednesday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had interrupted functioning of the country’s military-grade Starlink terminals. Presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov wrote on Telegram that Ukrainian defense forces “did not receive warning about this limitation, and this led to the disruption of several missions.”
Ukrainian officials said that the Starshield receptors mounted on fast-moving drones stopped working altogether. The receptors were working again Thursday, but only at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, Reuters reported.
At first it seemed possible that Musk was directly behind the service disruption—but he claimed on X that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”
A senior White House official denied that President Donald Trump was behind it, but did not respond to questions about whether another administration official might have made the order. “No such request was ever made by the president,” they told Reuters.
The disruption began just days after Trump publicly criticized Ukraine for continuing to attack Russian oil refineries after the U.S. lifted sanctions on the sale of Russian oil in a last-ditch attempt to alleviate financial strain ahead of the midterm elections. Unfortunately, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s current commitments are only a small drop in the bucket in terms of the diesel shortage that Trump’s monthslong war with Iran has created.