Starlink terminals used by Ukraine’s military and other national security agencies lost connectivity on Tuesday evening when they travelled at more than 100 miles per hour, while ordinary satellite communication terminals kept working. Serhii Sternenko, an activist with close ties to the military who first reported the outage, said the speed at which connectivity cut out later fell lower still, and Ukrainian and Russian outlets put the effective cap well below the figure in the first reports.
Serhiy Beskrestnov, a military technology adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the armed forces “did not receive a warning about these restrictions and this led to the failure of a number of missions”, and that the disruption appeared targeted rather than coincidental. No specific mission, unit or place was named in the reporting, and Poland’s foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski publicly appealed to Elon Musk over the restrictions, according to Ukrainian and Russian reporting alike.
Why the terminals were capped is not established. Sternenko alleged SpaceX acted at the Trump administration’s request, and the Guardian linked the outage to Washington pressing Kyiv to halt long range strikes on Russia’s oil industry immediately, with President Donald Trump blaming those strikes for high diesel costs. SpaceX gave no statement in the reporting opened, so the link between the cap and the refinery dispute remains an allegation from the Ukrainian side, not a confirmed motive.
The restrictions landed on a hard night regardless. Zelenskyy said Russia launched 39 ballistic missiles and 120 attack drones against Kyiv and Kharkiv late on Tuesday, hitting power plants and substations and leaving at least 600,000 people without power, and the Guardian reported it was the second night running that Russian ballistic missiles arrived with no advance warning from the United States.