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Ukraine’s access to Starshield is being restored by Thursday after the US military satellite network was suddenly throttled earlier this week — but there are still questions about who restricted access and why.
Starshield bandwidth is returning after an outage that prevented Ukraine from effectively deploying interceptor drones to fend off incoming attacks, said Denys Sienik, a top diplomat at the Ukraine Embassy in Washington.
“Starshield speeds have been improved, at the moment,” he told The Post. “We hope all will be resumed to the previous level.”
“Speed is critical for logistics, and for intercepting the jet-powered Shahed drones, especially when Russia constantly uses them to attack our cities and commit war crimes,” he added.
“Yesterday saw one of the most massive Shahed [drone] attacks, occurring precisely when our defense system’s speed was being throttled, and the circumstances behind this are deeply concerning.”
Ukraine also uses the American satellite network to guide long-range drone strikes in Russia.
Kyiv was thrown into a frenzy on Tuesday when its access to Starshield, a secure military offshoot of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system, was turned off in the middle of a spat between President Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the federal government owns and controls the Starshield systems, adding that any limits on speed or usage are dictated by the Pentagon and ultimately Trump.
But, a senior US official told The Post that Trump made no request to limit Ukraine’s Starshield access.
Another source said that Musk may have been inaccurate in suggesting the Trump administration was behind the shutdown.
The White House also told Ukrainian officials that they don’t have control over SpaceX, Axios reported.
Sienik said the Ukrainian government has yet to hear back from SpaceX or the Pentagon regarding the outage.
So far, it remains unclear who caused the disruption in Ukraine’s access to Starshield, a mystery that has stoked further uneasiness between Kyiv and Washington.