Sudden Starlink Restrictions Hit Combat Missions
According to Serhiy Beskrestnov, a military technology adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukrainian troops in combat lost access to their Starlink satellite internet terminals without warning on Tuesday evening. These high-speed terminals, supplied and operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX, are essential to Ukraine's military operations. Beskrestnov said the abrupt cutoff caused several combat missions to fail. Terminals moving faster than 100mph and running a Starlink version reserved for the military and other national security agencies abruptly went offline, in what looked like a deliberate outage aimed at disrupting military activity.[S1][S2]
Beskrestnov, also a well-known military blogger, said Ukraine's armed forces were given no notice of the restrictions, which he called plainly not accidental and tied to the current political situation. Serhiy Sternenko, a political activist with close military connections, was the first to report the outage and later said the speeds at which connectivity dropped had fallen even further. He proposed that SpaceX probably took such action at the Trump administration's request, while noting that ordinary satellite communication terminals kept working. Musk, a Trump ally, had earlier cut Starlink service to Ukrainian soldiers during an offensive that captured a small amount of Russian territory.[S1]
Russian Strikes and US Pressure on Ukraine
The abrupt outage coincided with Russia firing ballistic missiles at Ukraine for a second consecutive night without any prior warning from the US. For years, Washington had given Ukraine intelligence whenever strikes were imminent. Trump has insisted that Ukraine stop attacking Russian oil refineries, which he blames for high diesel costs, even though most analysts say the closure of the strait of Hormuz has affected global energy prices far more. Zelenskyy had implied, without stating it directly, that the US was deliberately holding back intelligence from Ukraine about upcoming Russian missile strikes.[S1]
Zelenskyy said Russia mounted a large-scale attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure late on Tuesday evening, firing 39 ballistic missiles and 120 attack drones at Kyiv and Kharkiv. The strikes damaged multiple power plants and important substations that supply electricity to the capital, including from a major power plant. Zelenskyy called the strike wholly deliberate and demonstrative in scale, adding that Russia had never before displayed such ostentatious disrespect toward the United States and does not regard the American president's statements as strong. He said at least 600,000 people were then without power, and outages could spread further.[S1]
