Elon Musk throttled Ukraine's drone war on Tuesday night. He did not tell Ukraine.
SpaceX restricted Starshield, the military version of Starlink that Ukraine's drones and vehicles run on, so that any terminal moving faster than 100 mph lost its connection. Nobody at SpaceX warned Ukraine's military. Ukraine filed a complaint and learned what had happened from SpaceX customer support.
Serhii Beskrestnov, Zelensky's adviser on military technology, said the armed forces "did not receive a warning about these restrictions and this led to the failure of a number of missions." Then he said it harder: "With their actions our partners are depriving us of one of the few chances we have to defend ourselves."
The same evening, Putin fired 39 ballistic missiles and 120 attack drones at Kyiv and Kharkiv. The strike hit all three of Kyiv's heat-and-power plants, left at least 600,000 people without power and killed at least six. Ukraine's air force said the first barrage came with no warning from its partners; the three that followed did. Zelensky called the strike "entirely deliberate and demonstrative in its scale," and said Russia "has never before shown such ostentatious disrespect toward the United States."
CBS reported, citing multiple sources, that the United States "may have intentionally withheld early warnings this week." American officials blamed bad weather. Trump said Tuesday: "We are helping them and we are sharing intel."
SpaceX said nothing.
Musk has done this before. He cut Ukrainian soldiers off once already: in September 2022, Reuters reported, Musk ordered Starlink switched off over Kherson as Ukraine's troops pushed the Russians out, and the troops lost their communications. SpaceX called the report inaccurate. And Wall Street Journal reporters found in October 2024 that Musk had been in regular contact with Putin since late 2022, and that Putin once asked him not to switch Starlink on over Taiwan, as a favor to Xi Jinping. The Kremlin says the two men spoke once, about space.
