Musk ordered Starlink slowed down for Ukrainian drones: who really holds the off switch on the war?

According to "The Wall Street Journal", Elon Musk personally ordered a slowdown of Starshield - the military service that runs on the Starlink satellite network and that the Ukrainian army relies on. The restriction, according to the paper's sources, was introduced last week and hit precisely the Ukrainian attack drones and the interceptors Ukraine uses to defend itself against Russian unmanned aircraft.

The technical detail is brutal in its simplicity: the terminals lost connection at speeds above 160 kilometres an hour. And a drone that has to intercept a Russian aircraft or dodge air defences doesn't fly slower than that. Ukrainian officials say nobody warned them and that several military missions were disrupted.

Why? According to the paper, Musk and Trump were angry about Ukrainian strikes on Russian diesel refineries, which Trump linked to high energy prices. The two men, according to the sources, discussed the restriction after it became public, and one source claims they also discussed it before it was introduced.

Then came the familiar game of pass-the-ball. Trump denied ordering the restriction and said he didn't think Musk was responsible for it. Musk wrote on X that Starshield is owned and controlled by the US government and that speed limits are set by the US military and the president. The White House, according to the paper, has started an informal review - which means that even in Washington nobody knows exactly who pulled the handbrake.

That is the heart of the story. A country at war runs its defence through a private network whose owner can - or can't, depending on who you ask - ground its drones with a single decision. There was no warning, and to this day nobody is responsible.

The Balkans know very well what it means when an outside power decides how long and how hard someone is allowed to defend themselves. The question Kyiv now has to ask itself out loud is simple: can you fight a war on someone else's switch?