How Elon Musk Turned on Ukraine

On October 11, a confidential memo went out to military officers across Ukraine, urging them to brace for a catastrophe. Donald Trump had decided earlier that week to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia and to begin buying its diesel fuel. Based on that shift in White House policy, the memo foresaw another act of American betrayal: the loss of access to the Starlink satellite network, which Ukraine uses to operate its drone fleet.

The document warned that Elon Musk, the creator of Starlink, might soon restrict service in Ukraine, and it urged users of the technology to “keep all communication alternatives to Starlink on standby—ready for immediate use—and develop contingency plans.” Two days later, the warnings began to come true. Starlink faltered across the war zone, grounding drones and halting military operations. In one case, it led to the loss of Ukrainian naval drones in the Black Sea, according to two people familiar with that mission.

The memo predicted worse to come. It came from a nongovernmental organization called Narodnyi Starlink, or “People’s Starlink,” which helps the armed forces of Ukraine acquire and operate this technology. In the memo, the group’s founder, Volodymyr Stepanets, envisioned several ways Musk could restrict service. The worst-case scenario—a total shutoff—would result in a cascade of disasters, potentially leading to Russia’s victory in the war. One senior U.S. military officer told us that “without Starlink, the war would grind to a halt.”

Musk himself has suggested that might be his goal. In a series of posts on X over the weekend, he admitted to causing last week’s outages, and he lashed out at those who call for greater military aid to Ukraine. “I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict,” Musk wrote. “May you burn in hell.”

Since the disruption, Ukraine and its allies have scrambled to find a replacement for Starlink, which relies on the world’s largest constellation of satellites to deliver high-speed-internet access anywhere in the world. But nothing comparable exists. The most promising effort in Ukraine to build such a system faced a major setback this summer, when its architect, Dmytro Stetsenko, died of apparent heart failure at the age of 46. European attempts to replicate Starlink are years away from matching its scale, and most of these efforts depend on Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, to launch their satellites into orbit.

Russia, by contrast, has its own fleet of space rockets, and it is racing to field a network of satellites that can rival Starlink. The system, known as Rassvet, or “Sunrise,” would give Russia an “asymmetric advantage” in the war, says Andrey Liscovich, a co-founder of the Ukraine Defense Fund, which has helped secure thousands of Starlink terminals for the Ukrainian military. “They will be precise enough to fly these low-cost, jet-powered drones through a window anywhere in Ukraine,” Liscovich told us. Without Starlink, Ukraine would not be able to respond.

Vladimir Putin said today that Russia has stayed in touch with Musk about Starlink. “Elon Musk is a genius, really a genius,” the Russian leader said at a televised summit in Moscow. He praised SpaceX for taking the lead in the race to develop this technology. “We are only taking the first steps,” Putin said of Russia’s answer to Starlink. “We are in close touch with our American colleagues, including Mr. Musk, because in orbit it is very important not to get in each other’s way.”

This account of Musk’s turn against Ukraine is based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. and Ukrainian officials, military officers, drone manufacturers, and experts on Starlink. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive military operations and private negotiations. Several of them have dealt with Musk and his company directly since the start of the war, in 2022, and they have seen his views on Ukraine shift from generous support to outright hostility.

If anything can yet restrain Musk from abandoning Ukraine, it may be his own financial interests. His company has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the Starlink terminals operating in the war zone. Liscovich estimates there are well over 250,000 of them. In the past, SpaceX, which runs Starlink, has reportedly charged the Ukrainian government $2,500 per terminal each month, and it has cut off service when bills go unpaid. Earlier this month, when U.S. military officials asked SpaceX about the outages in Ukraine, the company advised switching to an upgraded contract to restore Ukraine’s access, U.S. officials told us. (Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions for this article.)

In June, SpaceX held the biggest initial public offering in history, earning a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion. Revenue from Starlink keeps SpaceX investors happy and bankrolls Musk’s other projects, including his obsession with colonizing Mars. If he pulls the plug on Starlink in Ukraine, other countries could deem the service unreliable and accelerate the race to build an alternative. But those projects will not be ready until next year at the earliest. Until then, the world’s richest man will be largely free to decide Ukraine’s fate.

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When the war began, Musk seemed eager to help Ukraine defend itself. Russia used missile strikes and cyber weapons to take down Ukraine’s digital infrastructure in the opening days of the invasion. To keep the country online, Musk donated thousands of Starlink antennas to its hospitals, power plants, government ministries, and various humanitarian causes.

Soon, the Ukrainian military began using the service to pilot its drones and stay connected in the war zone. The service provided a critical advantage: The Russians had no access to Starlink and no way to jam its signal, which allowed Ukraine’s drones to crisscross the battlefield, dropping bombs on Russian troops.

Images of these attacks spread online in 2022, and they caused alarm at SpaceX headquarters in Texas. “More and more people became uncomfortable,” a former SpaceX engineer who worked on the system’s development told us. Some of his colleagues left the company in protest. Their team had designed Starlink to give people internet access in places where broadband cannot reach, like hiking trails and ships at sea, not to wage a war.

Musk also had apprehensions. In September 2022, Ukrainian officials asked him to switch on Starlink in the Black Sea. They wanted to use it in a sneak attack against Russian warships near the occupied region of Crimea. Musk refused. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars,” he said around that time to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

At the end of 2022, Musk announced the launch of a service called Starshield. Reserved for military clients, it costs far more to use than Starlink. In Ukraine’s case, the U.S. government has paid for a lot of that service, handing Musk’s company a sizable windfall. In exchange, the Pentagon gets more control over Ukraine’s access to the satellites. Colin Kahl, then the U.S. undersecretary of defense, negotiated this arrangement with SpaceX, and he later told The New Yorker that it would “prevent Musk from turning off the switch.”

But, for the most part, the Ukrainian military did not transition to using Starshield. It continued to use regular Starlink antennas, the kind available at Walmart and other retailers around the world. Their service costs as little as $30 a month, compared to as much as $25,000 for Starshield. The fine print in the Starlink user agreement bans its use for military purposes. But Musk’s company did not enforce that rule in Ukraine. It maintained the pretense that Starlink would be reserved for peaceful purposes, while the military would rely on Starshield antennas, largely paid for by American taxpayers. The reality was quite different. “They’re using it for everything,” the senior U.S. military officer told us of Ukrainian reliance on Starlink. “Drones, command and control, tactical communication on the battlefield.”

The U.S. government has not disclosed how many Starshield terminals it has provided to Ukraine. But Ukrainian officials and experts told us that they account for less than one percent of all the terminals in the war zone. The rest are regular Starlinks purchased on the retail market, including thousands bought in bulk for Ukraine by the governments of Poland and Germany. “Officially, these were supposed to be for humanitarian use,” a person who has negotiated with SpaceX on Ukraine’s behalf told us. “But everybody knew that they are going to the military.”

This wink-wink arrangement put Ukraine in a dangerous spot. To operate its drone fleet and stay online in the war zone, its armed forces had no choice but to break the rules of Starlink service. “It’s much cheaper that way, and easier to scale,” a Ukrainian official told us. The military could get as many Starlink terminals as it needed through foreign donors and the commercial market. It could attach them to drones and launch them at the Russians without thinking twice about the cost. Starshield, by contrast, is far more expensive and only available in small batches through official government channels.

This spring, the U.S. military faced a similar dilemma in the Middle East. According to a Reuters report that cited Pentagon documents, U.S. forces used Starshield to pilot their drones for strikes against Iran. When SpaceX found out, it raised the price for Starshield service in that region from roughly $5,000 per terminal per month to $25,000. The Pentagon agreed to pay.

In Ukraine, Musk could be attempting a similar upsell. By enforcing the ban on military use of Starlink, he could oblige the Ukrainian military and its foreign allies to pay much more for Starshield. Musk’s explanation for the outages this month suggest he would be fine with that approach, even though it could allow the war to continue. “Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be,” he wrote on X on Saturday. “That loophole was closed last week.”

The statement confused a lot of Starlink clients in Ukraine. For military users, the loophole still appears to be open and the service operational. Ukraine’s defense minister announced at the end of last week that Starlink service had returned to normal in the war zone. Two military officers told us that drones equipped with Starlink terminals have resumed their flights, including strikes on Russian forces. They realize, of course, that Musk could ground them again whenever he wants, and the next outage could last much longer—as the memo from People’s Starlink forewarned.

“We have one very serious weak spot, and that’s our dependence on Starlink,” Denys Shtilerman, one of Ukraine’s most prolific drone developers, told us. “Next year we’ll address it,” he said. “Before that, America will have enormous leverage, the ability to blackmail us.”

Developing a Starlink alternative could take much longer than a year, and it would be unlikely to succeed without Musk’s help. Roughly 90 percent of all the mass delivered into orbit travels on SpaceX rockets. Even Europe’s main competitor to Starlink, a French-British project known as the OneWeb network, relies on SpaceX to launch its satellites. Last month, the parent company of OneWeb announced plans to spend a billion euros to procure 229 additional satellites by 2034. That would bring its total to around 1,000—a fraction the size of the Starlink network, which includes more than 11,000 satellites, the largest constellation by far.

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With the recent disruptions in Ukraine, Musk showed that he can cut off the service any time he wants. The memo from People’s Starlink described the several ways he has to do that. Stepanets, its author, noted that Musk could start charging more for the use of Starshield antennas, forcing the U.S. government to pay up or cancel the service.

In the most extreme case, the company could block Ukraine’s access entirely. Musk’s statements appear to countenance that. But Stepanets noted that such a move could blow up in Musk’s face. “Radical blackouts and humanitarian catastrophes make for a very bad public image,” he wrote in the memo. They would also not do much to help SpaceX’s profit margins or its stock price. Such considerations could restrain Musk’s urge to abandon Ukraine. But, either way, it will be his choice to make.

Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer contributed reporting.