Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that Ukraine does not have access to Starshield, the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, but that a request from Kyiv to use it for strikes deep inside Russia is “under discussion.”
Mr. Rubio spoke to reporters at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, Al Jazeera reported, and the State Department released his remarks. “I know Ukraine wants access to Starshield. They do not have Starshield now. They’ve asked for access to it in order to conduct deep strikes inside of Russia,” he said.
“It’s not at this moment available to Ukraine, and that’s under conversation,” he said, according to Ukrinform. “It’s under discussion right now how they would want to use it.”
He drew a hard line between the two products. “Starlink is a commercial product, okay? And so it’s regulated and handled as a commercial product. Starshield is a defense product, a military product,” Mr. Rubio said. “Starshield is a contract with the U.S. military, it has nothing to do with Ukraine.”
Ukrainian officials have talked about the system as if they already had it. Denys Sienik, Ukraine’s chargé d’affaires in Washington, said Kyiv was waiting for an official answer from the Pentagon and SpaceX on fully restoring Starshield’s operation, and that its performance was still unstable. President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine still can’t use its interceptors against Russian drones because of speed restrictions placed on Starshield, CBS News reported.
The fight is over speed. Mr. Zelensky has said the satellites stop tracking antennas on objects moving faster than 161 kilometers an hour, or 100 miles an hour. That rules out interceptor drones built to bring down Russia’s jet-powered Shaheds, he said, and it hampers medium-range strikes.
Mr. Rubio rejected Mr. Zelensky’s suggestion that a disruption to service in Ukraine on Wednesday was deliberate. “I don’t know what Zelensky said, I’m not sure Zelensky knows what he’s talking about, but it wasn’t deliberate,” he said. “No one at the White House ordered anyone to slow down internet,” he said, calling the reports “categorically false,” according to the Kyiv Post. His understanding, he said, was that service had been restored to what it was before.
A report in The Telegraph tells a different story. Citing four people familiar with the matter, the newspaper reported that Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, proposed limits on the satellite service to President Trump, who approved them, which cleared the way for Pentagon restrictions on what Starshield could do. Mr. Musk had earlier put the blame for the cap on Washington.
SpaceX launched Starshield in 2022 for the U.S. government. It offers deeper encryption for handling sensitive information, and the company says its main users are U.S. defense agencies and other “government partners.”
The dispute comes as Mr. Trump faces criticism from both parties for waiving sanctions on Russia and on buyers of its oil and gas, days before measures in a law he signed last month were due to take effect. Mr. Zelensky said such financial rewards for President Vladimir Putin “only encourages him to keep attacking.”
Mr. Rubio made his remarks before flying abroad. Ukrinform said he was leaving for India, while TASS said he spoke before a flight to Uzbekistan, where he is expected in Samarkand.