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Ukraine's Starlink was briefly restricted
Musk says any decision would have come from the Pentagon, not his company. Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, said people are dying as a result of the lost connectivity. The Trump administration spent some days equivocating and has now said, very narrowly, that the order did not come from the president. Who flipped the switch has not been established.
Starlink provides communication for Ukraine's army, and SpaceX also works for NASA and the Pentagon. In earlier reporting at The New Yorker, US officials expressed alarm that the government had let one man become infrastructure and had increasingly little way to compel him to follow its policy directives.
How does Starlink work in a war zone?
Starlink uses thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, roughly 550 kilometers up in its first shells, which keeps signal delay short enough for video calls and drone feeds. A flat terminal on the ground tracks satellites as they pass overhead and relays traffic to ground stations connected to the wider internet. Because the network is controlled through software, the operator can switch service on or off in a given region. Ukraine began receiving terminals in late February 2022, shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion.
Why did Ukraine turn to satellite internet?
On February 24, 2022, the day of the invasion, a cyberattack disabled modems on Viasat's KA-SAT network, cutting satellite internet across Ukraine and in parts of Europe. The US, UK, and European Union governments attributed the attack to Russia. The outage also knocked out remote monitoring for about 5,800 wind turbines in Germany. Ground-based networks in a war zone are exposed to shelling and power cuts, which is why satellite links became a backup for the military.
Who pays for Ukraine's Starlink service?
The first terminals in 2022 were shipped as donations, with funding from SpaceX, the US Agency for International Development, and the Polish government, among others. In 2023, a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed that the Defense Department had signed a contract with SpaceX for Starlink service in Ukraine. Governments often buy satellite communications from commercial providers rather than build their own networks. The US military has done so for decades with companies such as Iridium and Inmarsat.