On the evening of Tuesday, 13 October, Ukraine’s war ran into a speed limit nobody had told it about. Military Starlink terminals moving faster than 100mph lost their connection. These run on Starshield, the version SpaceX builds for armies and security agencies, and Ukraine uses them to steer drones over long distances. Serhiy Beskrestnov, who advises President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on military technology and also writes a popular military blog, said the outage caused several combat missions to fail, as Andrew Roth reported in The Guardian.
Our armed forces did not receive a warning about these restrictions and this led to the failure of a number of missions. It’s clear that this action cannot be a coincidence and is connected to the current political situation.
The limit was narrow, and that is why it hurt. Static terminals were not reported cut, so soldiers in trenches could still talk to one another. The detection of incoming missiles depends on other systems. The damage fell on Ukraine’s mid-range strike campaign, which guides drones by satellite to targets behind the front in occupied territory. It also fell on the interceptor drones that Ukraine sends up against Russia’s new jet-powered attack drones, according to the Kyiv Independent. Those are machines that already outrun most of Kyiv’s defences. Beskrestnov told Al Jazeera that Ukraine had been “deprived of one of the few chances to defend itself from Shahed drones.”
The same night
While the drones were losing their signal, the missiles came. Zelenskyy said Russia fired 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 attack drones overnight and into Wednesday morning, mainly at Kyiv and Kharkiv. Ukraine’s air force said it intercepted four. According to Zelenskyy, 26 facilities in the power system and four in the oil and gas sector suffered “significant damage to facilities and equipment”, one of the capital’s main combined heat and power plants among them. At least 600,000 people woke up without electricity. Kyiv authorities reported at least two dead and more than 20 injured, Christopher Miller of the Financial Times reported. Al Jazeera put the toll from two consecutive nights of ballistic strikes on Kyiv at at least nine.
“Our systems detected these missiles only when they were already virtually on approach to Kyiv,” Zelenskyy said. The targets, he noted, were “the very infrastructure covered by the ceasefire announced by the American President.” He called the strike “entirely deliberate and demonstrative in its scale” and added: “Russia has never before shown such ostentatious disrespect towards the United States.”
For years Washington has warned Kyiv when Russian strikes were on the way. This was the second night without such a warning. Col Yurii Ihnat, an air force spokesperson, said no warning came before the first barrage on Tuesday, but “foreign partners” did warn of the three that followed. Trump has denied cutting intelligence sharing. In an interview with NPR, Zelenskyy said sharing was continuing but confirmed that his military advisers had been threatened with limits. Reuters sources said the US had threatened to withhold early-warning intelligence to push Kyiv into ending its strikes on Russian refineries. Senator Jeanne Shaheen said: “These restrictions on Ukraine’s access to Starshield must stop immediately. Lives are at stake.”
Whose hand is on the switch
SpaceX would not confirm any change. Then Musk posted on X that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the U.S. military and ultimately POTUS,” Via Satellite reported. He drew a distinction: Starshield is owned and controlled by the US government, while commercial Starlink belongs to SpaceX. The Wall Street Journal, cited by Yahoo Finance, reported that Ukraine’s Starshield access comes under a contract handled by the Defense Department. The White House neither confirmed nor denied Musk’s account, and the Pentagon did not answer Al Jazeera.
This is not the first time. In 2022, as Ukraine retook ground, Musk reportedly ordered coverage cut in contested areas. In 2023, Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president, said: “There are things that we can do, and have done.” In 2025 Musk promised that “Starlink will never turn off its terminals.” What is new is that SpaceX became a public company this summer, and that responsibility is now being passed from one office to another.
Serhii Sternenko, the activist who first reported the outage, said SpaceX had “likely” acted “at the request of the Trump administration.” According to The New York Times, Ukrainian officials suspected the order “had come from Washington.” Trump has demanded an end to Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries and blamed them for the high price of diesel, though most analysts say the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has done far more to energy prices. Beskrestnov tied the timing to Trump’s deal to import Russian diesel. Zelenskyy called the restriction “a big mistake” that “will bring a lot of human losses,” and said: “It’s painful when President Trump chooses one side, not our side.”
One reflection is allowed here. When a ruler cannot order a war to end, he can sometimes order a road to become slower.
The customers are watching
Poland pays for Ukraine’s Starlink subscriptions. Its foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, wrote on Musk’s own platform: “Hey, @elonmusk, big man, are you playing politics with your products again? As your European customers, we are watching you.”
Others drew the strategic lesson, Common Dreams reported. Ian Bond of the Centre for European Reform said the episode “should set off a siren in every defense ministry in Europe.” Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times called it “a perfect illustration of the danger of relying on US technology.” Steve Peers of Royal Holloway argued that if Musk is in effect assisting Putin’s invasion, “Ukraine’s allies should sanction Starlink, X, and Tesla.” Nicholas Grossman of the University of Illinois wrote: “The problem is too much power, especially for an enemy of democracy.” Musk, Trump’s largest donor in 2024, has spent at least $276 million since July to help Republicans keep Congress.
Zelenskyy flew to London on Wednesday morning to meet Prime Minister Andy Burnham. A presidential adviser said Ukraine’s officers were trying to settle the matter through the coordination centre in Wiesbaden, Germany, where the country’s military liaison with its Western partners is run. A whole army’s ability to fly now depends on a decision taken somewhere along that chain.