Starlink is back to full speed in Ukraine, and Musk now says SpaceX restricted it

The skim

• Ukraine's defense ministry said Saturday that Starlink and Starshield, the military version controlled by the US government, are back to full speed after more than a week of limits that cut drone links at around 100 mph.
• Hours later, Elon Musk said SpaceX had restricted commercial Starlink on purpose, accusing Ukraine's military of breaking its terms of service by using it for "offensive drone strikes." He said Starshield is controlled by the US government.
• Ukrainian officials say that's not possible, since commercial Starlink doesn't work over Russia. The episode shows how much of Ukraine's defense runs through one company's network.

What happened

For more than a week, Ukrainian drones flying faster than about 100 mph (160 km/h) were losing their satellite connection, which cost the military drones and made interceptors less useful against fast Russian attack drones, CNN and TechCrunch report. On Saturday, Defense Minister Yevhenii Khmara said the ministry's monitoring was "recording speeds exceeding 400 km/h; the connection is stable," according to CNN. President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that "the speeds are now where they need to be," NPR reports. CNN noted that one source in the Donetsk region still saw the old limit Saturday morning.

The fix followed reports, first in The Wall Street Journal and confirmed to CNN by a person familiar with the matter, that President Trump called Musk and asked him to restore Ukraine's access. Trump wouldn't say whether he made the call: "The bottom line – he put it back."

Musk's explanation

Until now, no one had taken responsibility for the limits. On Oct. 14, Musk wrote that "any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS." But on Saturday night he wrote that "Ukraine['s] military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people. That loophole was closed last week," the BBC reports. In another post he said, "We simply enforced our terms of service when they were bypassed," according to NBC News. He still says Starshield is up to the US government.

Ukrainian officials pushed back. Presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov said commercial Starlink doesn't work over Russian territory, so Ukraine "physically" can't use it for deep strikes, and called it strange that Musk didn't know about the restrictions. Serhii Sternenko, a former drone adviser to the defense ministry, wrote on X that terminals working on the move had to be registered on Starshield, so drone missions that needed satellite links ran through Starshield, not commercial Starlink.

Why it matters

Starlink has been Ukraine's battlefield backbone since 2022, used for frontline communications, logistics and interceptor drones. The limits arrived in the middle of a dispute between Washington and Kyiv over Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries, the BBC notes. Musk himself has written that "were Starlink to be turned off, the Ukrainian front line would collapse immediately." When a single company's terms of service can change what an army can do, governments that rely on commercial satellite networks have a new risk to plan for.

The timing is awkward for SpaceX, which this week laid out plans to turn Starlink Mobile into a major US carrier. Customers, carriers and governments will all be watching how it decides who gets full service.

What's next

As of Saturday, Ukraine's defense ministry said it was still testing the connection and hadn't been given an explanation for the limits, TechCrunch reports, citing the Journal. Musk says the "loophole" stays closed, so how Ukraine's commercial terminals are used, and who decides that, is likely to keep coming up as US-led peace talks continue.

Sources: CNN, BBC, NBC News, NPR and TechCrunch.