Reuters reported on a previously unknown order from billionaire Elon Musk to SpaceX engineers to disable the Ukrainian military’s Starlink satellite internet service. It slowed the liberation of occupied territories in 2022 and prevented the encirclement of Russians in the city of Beryslav in the Kherson region.
Reuters reported on a previously unknown order from billionaire Elon Musk to SpaceX engineers to disable the Ukrainian military’s Starlink satellite internet service. It slowed the liberation of occupied territories in 2022 and prevented the encirclement of Russians in the city of Beryslav in the Kherson region.
According to three Reuters sources with knowledge of the order, Musk instructed a senior engineer at SpaceX’s California office to stop coverage in some areas of Ukraine, including the Kherson region, which the Defense Forces were then trying to retake.
«We have to do this», — Michael Nichols, a Starlink engineer, told his colleagues after receiving the order, the insider claims. Employees complied with the order, shutting down at least a hundred Starlink terminals. The move also affected other areas occupied by the Russian Federation, such as the Donetsk region.
Because of Musk’s order, Ukrainian troops suddenly faced a communications blackout, according to a Ukrainian military official, an advisor to the armed forces, and two others who experienced a Starlink outage near the front lines.
«Soldiers panicked, drones tracking Russian troops disappeared from screens, and long-range artillery units relying on Starlink for fire guidance were unable to hit their targets,» Reuters writes.
This led to the fact that the Armed Forces of Ukraine were unable to surround Russian positions in the city of Bereslav, east of Kherson.
«The encirclement has completely stopped. It has failed,» the publication’s Ukrainian interlocutor said.
In the end, Ukraine’s counteroffensive was successful, taking back Berislav, the city of Kherson and some other Russian-occupied territories. But Musk’s previously unreported order suggests the billionaire was trying to intervene in the fighting. The decision shocked some Starlink employees and effectively changed the front lines, allowing Musk to «take the outcome of the war into his own hands,» one of the three people told Reuters.
It was previously reported that the head of SpaceX may have given a secret order to his engineers to disable the Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast in order to disrupt a Ukrainian attack on the Russian navy. Subsequently, Musk repeatedly denied giving such an order.
However, after Trump came to power in the US and Ukraine’s inclination to resume negotiations with the Russian Federation, Elon Musk hinted that he might disable Starlink in Ukraine. However, after Ukraine and its allies began looking for alternatives to SpaceX’s satellite internet, Musk again began to deny that he was going to disable Starlink.
Reuters reports that Musk and Nichols did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. A SpaceX spokesperson said in an email that the news agency’s reports were «inaccurate» and directed reporters to a post in X earlier this year in which the company said: «Starlink is fully committed to providing services to Ukraine».
Starlink is still providing services to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian military relies on it for communications. And in 2025, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy publicly thanked Musk for Starlink.
«Regarding Starlink, Elon Musk really helped. Here I can thank his team and him for the fact that we received Starlink. This is a fact. This was our advantage, and it was very important. I’m talking not only about the battlefield, but also about hospitals, kindergartens. After the attacks on the Starlink infrastructure, they helped us», — Zelenskyy said in an interview with Bloomberg, which he gave during his stay in Davos.
Recall that on July 24, at about 10:00 PM, Starlink satellite communication stopped working around the world, including in the Ukrainian military. It resumed its work after 2.5 hours. SpaceX explained the problem by a failure in the network’s software core.
