WASHINGTON, October 16. /TASS/. Starshield telecommunication services to the Ukrainian military were restricted earlier this week upon a request from the White House, the Reuters news agency reported.
"The order to limit a satellite system used by Ukraine for battlefield communications and drone operations came from inside the White House," the agency wrote, citing two US officials and an official from another Western country
The Pentagon "received a message that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed," Reuters reported, without specifying who made the decision.
It also quoted a senior US official as saying that "no such request was ever made by the [US] president."
Earlier, Vladimir Zelensky called the shutdown of Starlink for Ukraine a mistake and asked SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to restore service. In turn, Sergey Beskrestnov, an advisor to Zelensky and an expert in communications and unmanned systems, reported that SpaceX had limited the operating speed of Starlink terminals for the Ukrainian military to 160 kilometers per hour. According to him, this "disrupted a number of operations."
The RBC-Ukraine news agency reported on October 15, citing sources, SpaceX’s military and intelligence satellite program Starshield that uses Starlink infrastructure, has fully resumed operations in Ukraine.