US President Donald Trump said he does not know who restricted the operation of Starlink in Ukraine, but noted that Elon Musk restored the system. His comments were part of an interview with CBS News broadcast on November 8.
Asked whether Musk personally had reduced the service’s speed, Trump replied: „I can’t tell you who restricted it. I don’t know, because I don’t know.“ He added that it had not even been proven to him that the system had actually been restricted.
„What I do know, however, is that when I heard about it, it started working again,“ the US president said. According to him, the problem was resolved relatively quickly and access was restored.
What happened to communications
The restrictions were recorded in mid-October. Ukrainian officials said that both Starlink and Starshield had been affected – the military version of SpaceX’s satellite infrastructure, used for communications, drone control and other operations.
Yevhen Karas, commander of Ukraine’s 413th Separate Regiment of Unmanned Systems, told the Associated Press that the outage lasted about one day. According to him, several drones and other systems were affected, missions failed, and some of the craft were lost because of the disrupted communications.
Reuters reported that the restrictions had hindered the use of attack drones against Russian targets and high-speed interceptors designed to counter Russian unmanned aircraft. The exact mechanism of the restrictions and the boundary between the commercial Starlink service and the military Starshield remained unclear.
Conflicting claims over responsibility
On October 24, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence said that monitoring systems had recorded the restoration of Starlink and Starshield speeds to more than 400 kilometers per hour.
Days earlier, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Washington had not ordered the service to be slowed down. „The United States, nobody ordered Starlink’s speed to be reduced. It just happened, but as I understand it, it has been restored,“ Rubio said.
Ukrainian officials, however, said that the restrictions had affected military operations, while no public confirmation of who had imposed them was provided. In his interview, Trump did not take responsibility for the decision and did not identify a specific perpetrator. He said only that Musk had restored the system’s operation.
Sources: cbsnews.com, investing.com, apnews.com