Musk Says Ukraine Violated Starlink Terms as Service Is Restored
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Elon Musk said SpaceX had restricted Ukraine’s use of its civilian Starlink satellite service, accusing Kyiv’s military of violating the terms of service by employing it for attacks — a charge Ukrainian officials reject as the country’s connectivity is largely restored.
“Ukraine[’s] military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week,” Musk posted on his X account over the weekend, according to The Verge and the BBC. He denied deliberately throttling the connection and denied responsibility for a simultaneous degradation of Starshield, the encrypted, US-government-controlled variant of the system, writing that Starshield is “a different system and controlled by the US government” and that “what they decide to do is up to them.”
Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov called the post “very strange.” He said drones operating through Starlink in Ukraine were subject to a speed restriction of 70 to 90 kilometers an hour and did not function at combat altitudes. Serhii Sternenko, a former defense official, wrote that using civilian Starlink for drone missions “was technically impossible,” because terminals had to be placed on a special list and connected to Starshield to work at all in Ukraine.
The disruption, which Kyiv said hampered defensive operations for more than a week, affected Starshield most acutely. Ukraine relies on Starshield chiefly to intercept Russian Shahed attack drones and to give operators a real-time view of targets, while Starlink carries battlefield communications and some drone operations. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier this month that Ukrainian units had been unable to intercept “a certain number” of jet-powered Shaheds during the outage, calling the effect “very painful.”
Reuters reported, in an account cited by Gizmodo, that the decision to restrict access came from the White House rather than from Musk personally. The episode unfolded amid a wider dispute between Washington and Kyiv over Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure.
Ukrainian officials say connectivity problems appear resolved. Neither SpaceX nor the White House commented beyond Mr. Musk’s posts. The episode underscores Kyiv’s dependence on a single contractor’s networks for both communications and air defense.