Ukrainian troops report ‘catastrophic’ outages of Musk’s Starlink along front line

Ever since Russia took out Ukraine’s communications in the first days of the war, the Ukrainian military has had to rely on Starlink, provided by Musk’s SpaceX, for various aspects of command and control. The outages were said to have occurred right after entering formerly Russian-controlled territory and, in many cases, severely impeded the army’s ability to advance.

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Experts suspect that the outages were due to Starlink’s attempts to prevent Russia from using the technology, rather than cooperation with the Russians.

“It is absolutely clear to me that this is being done by representatives of Starlink to prevent the usage of their technology by Russian occupation forces,” Roman Sinicyn, a coordinator at an organization that seeks to donate more Starlink systems to Ukraine, told the Financial Times.

SpaceX did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.

Thousands of Starlink terminals were purchased by the U.S. government and crowdfunding in the early days of the war for use in Ukraine and have provided an essential role ever since. Aside from using the system to operate their critical drones, Ukrainian forces rely on Starlink heavily for communication, as they have no other means of a secure connection with each other.

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Despite the decisive role the system has played in Ukraine’s defense, Musk has become the target of Ukrainian ire this week, following a peace proposal he suggested over Twitter, which involved Ukraine ceding rights to Crimea in exchange for peace. The firestorm Musk ignited was so intense that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself took to Twitter to accuse Musk of being “pro Russia,” while a key adviser to the president photoshopped a picture of Musk held captive by Ukrainian forces.