Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia [View all]
Source: Reuters
July 25, 2025 7:00 AM EDT Updated 8 hours ago
KYIV - During a pivotal push by Ukraine to retake territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that disrupted the counteroffensive and dented Kyiv’s trust in Starlink, the satellite internet service the billionaire provided early in the war to help Ukraine’s military maintain battlefield connectivity.
According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, the Musk venture that controls Starlink, to cut coverage in areas including Kherson, a strategic region north of the Black Sea that Ukraine was trying to reclaim.
“We have to do this,” Michael Nicolls, the Starlink engineer, told colleagues upon receiving the order, one of these people said. Staffers complied, the three people told Reuters, deactivating at least a hundred Starlink terminals, their hexagon-shaped cells going dark on an internal map of the company’s coverage. The move also affected other areas seized by Russia, including some of Donetsk province further east.
Upon 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 Starlink failure near the front lines. Soldiers panicked, drones surveilling Russian forces went dark, and long-range artillery units, reliant on Starlink to aim their fire, struggled to hit targets. As a result, the Ukrainian military official and the military advisor said, troops failed to surround a Russian position in the town of Beryslav, east of Kherson, the administrative center of the region of the same name. “The encirclement stalled entirely,” said the military official in an interview. “It failed.”
Read more: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/musk-ordered-shutdown-starlink-satellite-service-ukraine-retook-territory-russia-2025-07-25/
I remember rumors reported about this around that time and there was a NYT article that mentioned the outage -
By Cade Metz, Cassandra Vinograd and Helene Cooper
Oct. 14, 2022
(snip)
In mid-September, Ukraine launched a counteroffensive and advanced into territory in the south that was previously occupied by Russia. Ukraine’s army lost access to the Starlink service in some areas near the front lines, three people with knowledge of the matter said. The service has been restored in key places, one of them said.
Days after the Ukrainian counteroffensive began, a Russian delegation to the United Nations suggested that Starlink satellites could become a military target. On Twitter, Mr. Musk insisted that Starlink was for peaceful use only.
Link to tweet
Mr. Musk then began promoting his proposed peace plan between Russia and Ukraine. He called on Ukraine to accept Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and agree to new referendums in Russian-occupied Ukraine that would let residents choose who should control those territories. He created a Twitter poll asking if “the will of the people” in occupied areas should decide if they were part of Ukraine or Russia.
Mr. Zelensky posted a Twitter poll of his own, asking, “Which Elon Musk do you like more: one who supports Ukraine, or one who supports Russia?” Mr. Musk countered by tweeting, “I still very much support Ukraine, but am convinced that massive escalation of the war will cause great harm to Ukraine and possibly the world.”
(snip)
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Starlink is meant for peaceful use only
9:48 PM · Sep 16, 2022
= new reply since forum marked as read