Exeter , The drone has become the signature weapon of the Russo-Ukraine war. On any day in Ukraine, tens of thousands of drones are out hunting the battlefield for targets. These could be individual enemy soldiers or vehicles, or they could be larger targets such as depots, headquarters, bridges or power plants.
When Russia mounted its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mykhailo Fedorov then Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation urged Musk publicly to provide connectivity. Two days later, 500 Starlink terminals arrived in Ukraine. In February 2022, Musk granted the Ukrainian government and military the use of Starlink, initially for free. By July 2020, Starlink had provided 15,000 terminals. It was a bold plan the first attempt by the Ukrainian to attack territory which the Russians had held since 2014 and which they considered sovereign.
The Ukrainians have fully admitted their dependence on Musk: “Without Starlink, we would have been losing the war already,” one platoon commander reportedly told the Wall Street Journal in 2022. Starlink allowed the government and the armed forces to communicate securely, at the heart of its vital system of C4ISR . And it was a controversial attack the Russian ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, had personally warned Musk that attacking Crimea would be a red line, which could lead to nuclear war.
In September 2022, Musk instituted a policy which contradicted US policy on Ukraine he turned off Starlink against the wishes of the Biden administration. Now, so Musk says, in October 2026, it’s US government which is restricting Starlink. The day after that, the US president announced that an energy ceasefire was in immediate effect and that Russia and Ukraine would stop targeting each other’s energy infrastructure.
The following day, Trump called for the removal of Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy: “Time for Ukraine to get a new president”, he told reporters. Musk has put the responsibility for the slowdown in Starshield squarely on the US government, posting on his X social media platform: “Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS. But the result is effectively the same: Ukraine is the victim.
