Did Elon Musk thwart Kiev's 2022 counteroffensive? The billionaire ordered Starlink to be turned off over the Kherson re

During Ukraine's decisive offensive to regain territory from Russia in late September 2022, Elon Musk gave an order that interrupted the counteroffensive and undermined Kiev's confidence in Starlink – the satellite internet service that the billionaire provided at the start of the war to help the Ukrainian military stay connected on the battlefield, Reuters reported.

According to three people familiar with the order, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of SpaceX, Musk’s company 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 it,” Michael Nichols, a Starlink engineer, told colleagues after receiving the order, according to one of the people. The employees complied, the three said, disabling at least 100 Starlink terminals, their hexagonal cells disappearing from the company’s internal coverage map. The measure also affected other areas occupied by Russia, including part of the Donetsk region further east.

On Musk’s orders, Ukrainian troops suddenly faced a communications blackout, according to a Ukrainian military official, a military adviser and two others who experienced the Starlink outage near the front lines. Soldiers panicked, drones monitoring Russian forces stopped working, and long-range artillery units that rely on Starlink to guide their fire had difficulty hitting their targets.

As a result, the Ukrainian military official and the military adviser said, troops were unable to encircle a Russian position in the city of Berislav, east of Kherson, the administrative center of the region of the same name. “The encirclement is completely blocked,” the military official said in an interview. "It failed".

Ukraine’s counteroffensive eventually managed to retake Berislav, the city of Kherson and some additional territory that Russia had occupied. But Musk’s previously unreported order is the first known instance of the billionaire actively cutting Starlink coverage over a battlefield during the conflict. The decision shocked some Starlink employees and effectively reshaped the front lines of the fighting, allowing Musk to take "the outcome of the war into his own hands," another of the three sources said.

The command’s account contradicts Musk’s version of how he managed Starlink service in Ukraine during the war. As recently as March, in a post on X, his social media site, Musk wrote: "We would never do such a thing." Musk and Nichols did not respond to requests for comment from the British media.

A SpaceX representative said in an email that the news agency's information was “inaccurate“ and directed reporters to a publication from earlier this year in which the company stated: “Starlink is fully committed to providing services to Ukraine.“

The representative did not point out any inaccuracies in that report and did not respond to a long list of questions about the incident, Starlink's role in the war in Ukraine or other details about the company's activities.

The office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the country's Defense Ministry did not respond to requests for comment. Starlink is still providing services to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian military relies on it for some of its connectivity. Zelensky publicly thanked Musk for Starlink earlier this year.