Skip to content 
The restrictions on Starlink services last week came amid a souring of relations between the White House and Ukraine after President Donald Trump agreed to a diesel deal with Russia, waived sweeping sanctions and called for Ukraine to get a new president.
The disruption to the service also coincided with what Ukrainian officials described as a temporary suspension of US intelligence warnings about impending Russian attacks.
In a response to Musk on Sunday, Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov said: “It is very strange that Elon Musk does not know about the restrictions on Starlink in Ukraine.”
“Starlink does not operate over Russian territory,” he said in a post on Telegram. “So we physically CANNOT USE COMMERCIAL STARLINK for deep strikes and intermediate strikes.”
Serhii Sternenko, a former drone adviser to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, said that using a civilian Starlink service for drone missions as described by Musk would be “technically impossible.”
“For any satellite terminal to work during movement, it had to be added to a special list and connected to the military Starshield system,” he posted on X.
“We are very grateful to the United States and SpaceX for access to critically important satellite communications. Ukraine did not violate the terms of use,” he added.
Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russia have continued over the past week despite the Starlink issues.
Asked whether he thought Trump or Musk directly made the decision to limit Starlink, Zelenskyy told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” last week that he didn’t know, but thought “both” were involved. He said that if Trump decides tomorrow to lift the restriction, “it will work immediately as it was before.”
Asked whether he had spoken to Musk on Thursday, Trump said: “I don’t want to comment on that, whether I called or whether someone else called doesn’t make a difference, I think. Bottom line — he put it back.”
In the dispute, there have been signs that Ukraine wants more control over its communications.
Last week, the country’s defense ministry announced a partnership with Nokia and Finnish satellite imaging company ICEYE to develop a “sovereign satellite communications” system, with the two companies already working to build a Starlink-style satellite internet system “built on trusted European technology.”
“Modern warfare has proven that reliable communications are a matter of national security,” Zelenskyy said at the time of the deal. “We all have to rely on abilities we can control.”
Musk’s ability to limit Starlink gives him “tremendous leverage,” said Moritz Brake, a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Security.
“This is really one of the reasons why the European Union is pursuing independent space infrastructure capabilities, military capabilities, communications capabilities,” he told NBC News.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius announced plans in 2025 to spend $39 billion on Germany’s defense space capabilities, but Brake said Europe still had a lot of ground to cover to match “the need for space assets in peace and war”.
“This is something that Ukraine is now experiencing at the sharp end,” Brake added.
There have been concerns about potential interference with Ukraine’s Starlink connection before, with a September 2022 outage occurring during a pivotal push by Ukraine to withdraw territory from Russia.
A Reuters report in 2025 cited three sources who claimed that Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive, triggering a communications blackout and leaving long-range artillery units dependent on Starlink struggling to hit their targets.
A SpaceX spokesman called the news agency’s report “inaccurate.”
