Starshield back to normal, but Kyiv still waiting for air defense missiles
After about 10 days of throttling, the Starshield military satellite network is working again in Ukraine, the Defense Ministry says. Who ordered the restriction remains unclear.
Symbolic image · Photo: Support Forces of Ukraine Command / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Ukraine can once again make full use of SpaceX’s Starshield military satellite network. Defense Minister Yevhen Khmara told Radio Free Europe the connection was stable; the ministry had also measured a working connection on devices moving at more than 400 kilometers per hour. Since around Oct. 13 or 14, the connection had dropped out at about 161 km/h, a problem for drones, for example. Khmara attributed the fix to “direct dialogue” and the president’s persistence.
It remains unclear who ordered the throttling. The U.S. government denies having ordered it; according to The Wall Street Journal, President Donald Trump had asked Elon Musk to lift the restrictions. Musk said Starshield is controlled by the U.S. government, according to RFE/RL. U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal had announced an investigation.
President Volodymyr Zelensky told ABC that the U.S. government’s approach was “not supportive.” Ukraine had received only 24 air defense missiles from its partners in 90 days, he said. Responding to U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff’s praise of Putin as a “humanitarian,” he quipped that he was perhaps “not such a big humanitarian as Putin.” Trilateral talks with Russia and the U.S. are to begin at a technical level in Abu Dhabi in November.