MOSCOW, October 14. /TASS/. The Ukrainian armed forces depend entirely on Starlink satellite internet, so the Kiev authorities must travel to the US to negotiate lifting the restrictions on access to it, Verkhovna Rada lawmaker Alexey Goncharenko (listed in Russia as a terrorist and extremist) said.
"We are 200% dependent on Starlink, absolutely. <…> What needs to be done urgently? Make every phone call to the US. Call, talk, negotiate, find common ground. A Ukrainian delegation should be on its way to the US right now," he wrote in a post on his Telegram channel.
That morning, Sergey Beskrestnov, an advisor to Vladimir 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 overnight. According to him, this "disrupted a number of operations." Later, Sergey Sternenko, a former adviser to the country’s defense minister, said that SpaceX had further restricted the terminals’ operating speed to 60-70 kilometers per hour that morning.