Musk Throttled Starlink at the Front and Putin Called Him a Genius: Ukraine's Defence Hangs on One Billionaire's Switch

The signal began to vanish on 13 October, along the entire front. Drones stayed on the ground, operations stopped, and expensive sea drones were lost in the Black Sea. Elon Musk later admitted publicly that he was behind it: Starlink is a civilian commercial service, he wrote, and the "loophole" in the rules has been closed.

This is reconstructed by a major investigation in an American magazine, based on conversations with more than ten American and Ukrainian officials, soldiers and experts. It all begins with a confidential memo of 11 October to Ukrainian army commanders. After Donald Trump eased sanctions on Moscow and decided to buy Russian diesel, it became clear Kyiv could lose Starlink too, and the entire fleet of combat drones depends on it.

The warning came from the NGO "People's Starlink", whose founder Volodymyr Stepanets wrote that a full shutdown would trigger a chain collapse and, in the end, a Russian victory. A senior American officer confirmed how serious it was: "Without Starlink, the war would simply stop."

"Burn in hell"

Musk didn't apologise. On X he wrote that he feels "total contempt" for the "evil warmongers" who pose as moral while pushing endless slaughter and offering no real solution. His message to them: "Burn in hell." His argument is that using Starlink for offensive drone strikes was never allowed.

Volodymyr Zelensky tells a different story. The system wasn't switched off, its speed was reduced. Kyiv, he says, doesn't use it for strikes inside Russia, but to intercept Russian jet drones that kill civilians, for strikes on military targets in occupied territory and for delivering food and water by drone to soldiers on the front line. "It is extremely painful and frustrating," Zelensky said. The signal has since returned, but Ukrainian operators in the field know they can be left in the dark again.

When American officers asked SpaceX why the system went down, they got an answer straight from a government counter: Ukraine has to switch to a significantly more expensive contract model. Ordinary commercial Starlink costs about 30 dollars a month, and the military Starshield up to 25,000 dollars per terminal. There are over 250,000 Starlink terminals on the battlefield. According to the investigation, the only thing stopping Musk from abandoning Kyiv altogether is financial interest.

From donated antennas to a ban on Crimea

At the start of the war Musk donated thousands of antennas for hospitals, heating plants and ministries, after Russian missiles destroyed the telecommunications network. Then the Ukrainian army began mounting them on combat drones en masse. In September 2022 he personally refused to turn on Starlink in the Black Sea, when Ukrainians were preparing a surprise sea-drone attack on Russian warships at occupied Crimea. He told his biographer Walter Isaacson that Starlink was created for people "to watch Netflix", not for drone strikes.

To calm the Pentagon, in late 2022 he launched a military variant called Starshield, with US government money. Then Under Secretary of Defense Colin Kahl gave assurances that the contract would stop Musk from "pulling the switch". It didn't. Starshield made up less than one percent of the equipment in the field, and the army carried on with ordinary civilian antennas. Hundreds of thousands of them were secretly funded by Poland and Germany, under the cover of humanitarian aid.

There is no replacement

The constellation has over 11,000 satellites and there is nothing like it on the market. The most serious Ukrainian attempt at a system of its own took a heavy blow this summer, when chief engineer Dmytro Stetsenko died suddenly at 46. European projects are years away from the necessary scale and, paradoxically, need rockets from SpaceX to reach orbit, a company that controls 90 percent of the world's capacity for launching payloads into space.

Meanwhile Russia is rapidly developing its own satellite network, Rassvet, and Vladimir Putin didn't hide his satisfaction at a gathering in Moscow: "Elon Musk is a genius, truly a genius." He added that Moscow is in close contact with American colleagues, including Musk, because in orbit it's important not to get in each other's way.

"We have one extremely dangerous weak point, and that is the dependence on Starlink. We will solve it next year, but until then America has enormous power of blackmail," admitted Ukrainian drone designer Denys Shtilerman. A contract with the Pentagon, money from Warsaw and Berlin and 250,000 terminals, and all of it can be slowed by one private switch. So what does the word sovereignty mean for a small Balkan country?