Russia-Ukraine war: Drones go dark when Elon Musk shuts down Starlink in 2022 – how powerful is the SpaceX boss? | Today’s news

Several Ukrainian officials recently claimed that SpaceX had suddenly scaled back its “military-grade” Starlink services, which Ukraine had been using on the battlefield against Russia. Sources told Axios that outages were observed late Tuesday but were later restored.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Kyiv’s limited access to Starlink had led to civilian deaths because Ukrainian fighter jets using the technology could no longer shoot down Russian drones as effectively.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk emphasized the difference between Starlink and Starshield services in response to the news, which has sparked confusion over whether the US government or SpaceX restricted access to Ukraine.

Starshield is a militarized version of Starlink that became a key part of the Ukrainian war in Russia. Starlink provides commercial services, while Starshield is designed for government and national security missions, providing secure communications with a higher level of encryption. However, Starshield relies on the wider Starlink network.

Musk’s comments on X sought to shift responsibility away from his company by merely referring to Starshield as hardware owned by the US government. Axios cited sources as saying that both SpaceX-owned Starlink and “US-controlled” Starshield services to Ukraine were disrupted this week.

There has been no confirmation from Musk or the US government whether they have intentionally restricted access. Although the system has since been restored, it remains unclear who made the call and why.

The decision has sparked a firestorm over who controls access to technology on Ukraine’s front lines, with Ukrainian officials blaming Musk and President Donald Trump’s administration.

Not for the first time

This was not the first time that Ukraine’s access to the Starlink system was restricted during the war with Russia, which began in February 2022.

The first known instance of a billionaire actively turning off Starlink coverage on a battlefield during a conflict was in September 2022, Reuters reported in a special report.

What happened in 2022?

In late September 2022, during a key push by Ukraine to regain territory from Russia, Elon Musk reportedly issued an order that disrupted Ukraine’s counteroffensive and undermined Kiev’s confidence in Starlink.

SpaceX began providing satellite internet service at the start of the war to help the Ukrainian military maintain battlefield connectivity.

While Musk’s company has not confirmed the claim, sources told Reuters that Musk told a senior engineer at SpaceX’s California offices to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic area north of the Black Sea that Ukraine is trying to reclaim.

Employees complied, three people told Reuters, disabling at least a hundred Starlink terminals, whose hexagon-shaped cells darkened on the company’s internal coverage map. The move also affected other areas occupied by Russia, including parts of Donetsk province further east.

What impact did it have on Ukraine’s performance on the battlefield?

Following Musk’s order, a Starlink failure occurred near the front lines of the war. Ukrainian soldiers suddenly faced a communications blackout, according to a Ukrainian military official, an adviser to the armed forces and two others who experienced the failure.

Soldiers panicked, drones monitoring Russian forces went dark and long-range artillery units that rely on Starlink to direct fire struggled to hit targets, according to a separate Reuters report.

As a result, a Ukrainian military official and a military adviser said troops failed to encircle a Russian position in the city of Beryslav, east of Kherson, the administrative center of the Kherson region. “The encirclement has completely stopped,” a military official said in an interview. “It didn’t work.”

In the end, the Ukrainian counter-offensive managed to regain Beryslav, the city of Kherson and some other territories that Russia had occupied.

According to the report, panicked calls by Ukrainian officials during the blackout for information from their Pentagon counterparts were met with several explanations for what could have caused it, five people familiar with the incident said.

What prompted Musk’s “order”?

It was unclear what prompted Musk’s order, when exactly he issued it, or exactly how long the outage lasted.

Three people familiar with the order told Reuters they believed it stemmed from concerns Musk later expressed that Ukraine’s move could provoke nuclear retaliation from Russia.

One of the people said the shutdown happened on September 30, 2022. Two others said it was around that time, but they couldn’t remember the exact date.

Some senior US officials shared Musk’s concern that Russia would make good on threats of escalation, a former White House official told Reuters.

What did Musk, SpaceX say about the 2022 incident?

The command’s account contradicted Musk’s account of how he handled the Starlink service in Ukraine amid the war. Back in March of that year, Musk wrote in a post on his social network X: “We would never do such a thing.

Musk and Nicolls did not respond to Reuters requests for comment. The US Department of Defense declined to comment. Reuters could not determine whether White House or Pentagon officials exchanged anything with Musk about the outage after the shutdown.

A SpaceX spokesman told Reuters in an email that the news agency’s reports were “inaccurate” and referred reporters to an X post from earlier this year in which the company said: “Starlink is fully committed to providing service to Ukraine.

The spokesman did not specify any inaccuracies in the report or answer a long list of questions about the incident, Starlink’s role in the war in Ukraine or other details about its business.

In 2023, SpaceX said it had taken unspecified steps to prevent Ukraine from using Starlink for certain activities, including drone strikes.

“It was never our intention for them to use it for offensive purposes,” Gwynne Shotwell, the company’s president, said at a conference in Washington in February of that year. “There are things we can do and have done” to prevent this, she added, without giving further details.

Starlink still provides services to Ukraine, which is heavily dependent on SpaceX’s thousands of Starlink terminals for battlefield communications and some drone operations, as they have proven resistant to espionage and jamming during three and a half years of fighting the Russian invasion.

Starlink does not operate in Russia. However, Ukrainian officials said that Moscow’s forces also make extensive use of the systems on the frontline in Ukraine.

Incident from 2025

Starlink experienced one of the largest international outages in July 2025. A senior commander told Reuters that Starlink systems used by Ukrainian military units were down for two and a half hours overnight. The outage was part of a global problem that disrupted satellite internet providers. “Starlink is down across the entire front,” said Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s unmanned forces, on Telegram in 2025.

Musk’s Dominance in Military Affairs: Can He Influence the Ukraine Conflict?

The Reuters report noted that Musk’s influence in military affairs in Washington and beyond — through Starlink’s dominance of satellite communications and SpaceX’s influence on space launches — has reached a dimension previously limited to sovereign governments, which has worried some regulators and lawmakers.

Musk’s “order” affecting Kherson raised concerns about his ability to influence the conflict in Ukraine. It shocked some Starlink employees and effectively reshaped the front lines of the fighting, allowing Musk to take “the outcome of the war into his own hands,” another of the three people said.

Meanwhile, Martha Lane Fox, a member of the upper house of the British Parliament, said during a debate in early 2025: “Elon Musk’s current global dominance exemplifies the dangers of concentrated power in unregulated domains.”

The MP is an entrepreneur and former board member of Twitter, the social network that Musk acquired in 2022 and renamed it X.

“Its control,” Lane Fox said of Starlink, “rests entirely with Musk, allowing his whims to dictate access to vital infrastructure.”

Musk blocked Starlink services in Crimea?

The Kherson episode differs from an earlier report of an incident that allegedly happened the same September, involving Crimea just to the south.

In his 2023 biography of Musk, author Walter Isaacson said the mogul ordered Starlink to disable coverage in Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine after a 2014 invasion condemned as illegal by the international community.

Musk, Isaacson wrote, believed that a planned Ukrainian attack on Russian vessels in the Crimean port of Sevastopol could provoke nuclear retaliation.

After the book was released, Musk denied the shutdown, saying it was never covered in Crimea.

The head of SpaceX said that he rather rejected the Ukrainian request to provide the service before the planned attack of Kiev. Isaacson later admitted that his account was in error. A spokesman for Isaacson’s publisher declined to comment or make him available for an interview.