The Ukrainian submarine drones were heading for Russian warships when, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.” CNN reported the account in September 2023: Musk, it said, had told SpaceX engineers to switch off Starlink coverage near Crimea.
Musk disputed that on X. Starlink had never been active in that area, he wrote, and Ukraine had asked for coverage “all the way to Sevastopol.” His reasoning: “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war.” The Kyiv Independent said it could not verify his version. Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov had asked Musk to restore the drones’ connection.
The dispute exposed the mechanics of a dependence Kyiv had built since the first weeks of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Starlink service for Ukraine and its military was paid for through private donations and a U.S. foreign aid contract. In late 2022, Musk first asked the Pentagon to take over funding, then reversed course and said he would keep the service running. By June 2023 the Pentagon had confirmed SpaceX held a Department of Defence contract for satellite services to Ukraine.
A military system, owned by a private firm
Follow the money and the hardware, and the arrangement looks different from a charity gift. Meduza described how deeply the terminals now sit inside Ukraine’s army. Surrounded infantry units rely on them. Headquarters uses them to reach shared command systems. Drones fitted with terminals fly over the front line as relays, passing connections to other drones and radio-controlled ground vehicles, and attack drones hitting targets 50-150 kilometers behind the line need the link for strikes on mobile targets.
Starshield, SpaceX’s military division, was set up in late 2022 for Pentagon contracts. Approximately 180 dedicated military satellites have been launched. The catch is that Starshield still leans on the civilian Starlink constellation, with software separating the military functions (stronger encryption, electronic warfare protection) from the civilian ones.
Who sets the limits
The switch has since been used. According to Meduza, on October 14, 2026 the U.S. capped speeds on Starshield terminals used by Ukrainian forces at 160 kilometers per hour, then cut the threshold to 60-80 km/h the next day before raising it again. At 160 km/h, Meduza said, attacks on mobile targets become extremely difficult and interceptor drones are unusable.
Earlier limits in 2026 had a different aim. A Russian special unit called Rubikon had been using civilian terminals to guide drones along the Pokrovsk-Dnipro highway, Ukraine’s main western Donbas supply route. Fedorov, then defense minister, negotiated a registry with Musk that shut down unregistered terminals. Within months, Russia’s military built mesh-network substitutes.
Ukraine has no replacement under its own control. Europe’s Eutelsat OneWeb constellation has 600 satellites and is being folded into the IRIS² system, but Meduza noted it offers “less bandwidth than Starlink.”
Sources
- CNN: Musk turned off Starlink near Crimea to prevent Ukraine's strike against Russian fleet
- Elon Musk refused Ukraine's request to activate Starlink network, fearing 'major' act of war
- How Ukraine's military uses Starlink, and what would happen if the Trump administration cut off its satellite communications entirely (Meduza)
