Elon Musk said on Wednesday, Oct. 14, that the US military – including US President Donald Trump himself, not SpaceX – decides speed limits on Ukraine’s military Starshield terminals.
His remarks came after restrictions imposed overnight on Oct. 13-14 disrupted Kyiv’s drone operations, particularly interceptor drones – among Ukraine’s few effective tools against Russian jet-powered Shahed drones, which are significantly harder to intercept due to their speed.
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“It is clear that the Russians are trying to exploit problems with Starlink’s operation in Ukraine, as interceptor drones rely significantly on this connection,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement on Wednesday, after meeting with British Prime Minister Andy Burnham in London.
Speaking during an interview on “Piers Morgan Uncensored,” released on Wednesday, Zelensky said he feels betrayed by Trump and warned that SpaceX’s new Starlink restrictions will cost lives. “I’m sure they knew what they did,” he said regarding the outage.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s former Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said Starlink’s connectivity at speeds of up to 160 kilometers per hour (100 miles per hour) is being restored. “Removing Starshield’s speed limit entirely is now critical for Ukraine’s defense,” he said in a post on X, thanking Musk for his “continued support.”
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Russian Strikes Destroy Epicentr K’s Last Major Logistics Hub
Russian forces destroyed Epicentr K’s last major logistics hub in Khmelnytskyi after ten missile and drone strikes, following attacks on the retailer’s shopping centers in Chernihiv and Dnipro.
According to the latest estimates by Zelensky, Russia launched 124 drones overnight and another 145 during the day, with more than 40 Shaheds still in Ukraine’s airspace as he wrote.
UK fast-tracks missiles against jet-powered drones
Zelensky said he and Burnham agreed to speed up deliveries of British air defense systems to counter the jet-powered drones, which fly faster and higher than older Shahed models.
Earlier on Wednesday, The British government said it would accelerate deliveries of Lightweight Multirole Missiles (LMMs), under a £45 million (approximately $60 million) surface-to-air missile package, bringing forward £10 million (approximately $13 million) to meet Ukraine’s urgent winter needs.
“My message to the Ukrainian people could not be clearer, we are with you for as long as it takes, and we will go further and faster in our support to back your courageous fight for peace in Europe” Burnham said ahead of the meeting.
He has also tasked ministers with preparing new sanctions and further military and financial aid.
According to the BBC, Burnham greeted Zelensky at Downing Street with a military ceremonial guard – the first such honor for a foreign leader.
The visit followed a massive overnight strike in which Russia fired at least 39 missiles and 128 drones, cutting power to at least 600,000 people, according to Zelensky earlier in the day.
Questions over US intelligence sharing
The recent strains with Washington deepened after Ukraine received no early warning from Western partners about incoming Russian ballistic missiles for two nights in a row.
Zelensky said Kyiv’s systems detected the missiles only as they approached the capital.
Although NATO and EU, as well as Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said they had seen no sign that sharing had stopped, recent reports by other senior Ukrainian authorities appeared to suggest otherwise.
The lapse followed reports that Washington had threatened to cut intelligence sharing for Kyiv during roughly eight hours of talks in Miami on Friday, Oct. 9.
Reportedly, senior US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner warned Ukraine’s delegation that it could lose access to US intelligence if it kept striking Russian oil refineries.
Several US media separately reported that Trump’s administration also warned it could suspend the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) – a mechanism that enables European purchases of US weapons for Ukraine, the main channel for buying Patriot interceptors.
US Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker denied the claims, saying that no change has been made.
On Oct. 9, Trump struck a diesel deal with Putin that eased US sanctions on Russian fuel, which 12 senators from both parties called “a betrayal of Ukraine” in a joint letter, urging the US President to rescind the diesel deal and enforce the new Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026.
Around the same time, Trump criticized Zelensky and said it was “time for Ukraine to get a new president.”
The US President then announced an energy truce on Oct. 11 that neither Kyiv nor Moscow confirmed, insisting the two sides agreed “because I said, ‘You agree.’”
Although Ukraine abided by the abrupt ceasefire announcement, Russia continued striking Ukraine nationwide. On Wednesday, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Trump’s energy truce was never defined, so Russia cannot be accused of breaking it.
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