Elon Musk just got caught slowing down Ukraine's war with Russia
1 hour ago · 17 October 2026Share
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Flight 1 post launch press conference. File photo. Daniel Oberhaus · CC BY-SA 4.0
Elon Musk told Donald Trump that Ukraine's military Starlink speeds should be slowed down.
And Trump went along with it. That's according to the Telegraph.
The Telegraph broke this two days ago. Four people familiar with the matter spoke to the paper. One of them says Trump agreed with Musk's idea. That's what cleared the way for the Pentagon to slow down Starshield, the military-grade version of SpaceX's satellite network. Two Ukrainian contacts and a senior European official backed up the Telegraph's account.
Here's the problem. Both men have denied this in public.
So let's go back to what actually happened.
Four days ago, SpaceX capped the speed on Ukraine's Starshield terminals. Overnight. No warning to Kyiv.
Any terminal moving faster than about 160 kilometres an hour lost its guidance link. Russia's jet-powered Shahed and Geran drones fly at roughly double that speed. So Ukrainian forces using Starlink-guided interceptors suddenly couldn't catch them.
Serhii Beskrestnov advises Volodymyr Zelensky on defence technology. He said on Telegram that Ukraine's forces got no warning, and that the restriction caused several missions to fail.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine's President, says the restriction also stopped food and water reaching front-line troops under constant Russian drone watch. He told Piers Morgan Uncensored the restriction was a big mistake that will cost lives. And separately, he said this wasn't a technical problem. It was a decision.
So what did Musk say? He posted on X that it wasn't his call. Starshield belongs to the US government, he wrote, and any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and the president.
And what did Trump say, two days later? That it wasn't him either.
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Visualisation of the 30,000 planned satellites from the Starlink Generation 2 constellation as of 2022. File photo. ESO · CC BY 4.0
Trump says quote "it wasn't me, and I don't think it was Elon".
He added that the system was the same as it had always been, and said he'd checked that morning and believed it was working normally.
So line it up. Musk says it was the government. Trump says it wasn't him, and probably wasn't Musk. And the Telegraph's four contacts say it was both of them, together.
And here's the twist. A senior contact told the Telegraph that once the backlash started, Musk got worried about how European customers would react. That contact says quote "the reality is that they were both in it".
Reuters landed somewhere in the middle of all this. Two unnamed US officials and a Western official briefed on the matter told Reuters the order came from inside the White House. They didn't say who gave it. But a senior US official separately told Reuters that no such request was ever made by the president. And a different senior US administration official told Axios, a day before that, that the White House had nothing to do with it.
Nobody is denying the restriction happened. They only disagree about who ordered it.
And the timing matters. This landed in the middle of a wider rift between Washington and Kyiv. Trump has been demanding Ukraine stop hitting Russian oil refineries. His administration has also struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel. Around the same time, the administration warned it could cut off intelligence-sharing with Ukraine if the refinery strikes didn't stop.
Radosław Sikorski, Poland's deputy prime minister, went after Musk directly on X. He wrote that Musk was playing politics with his products again, and that his European customers were watching him. Poland buys Starlink service for Ukraine.
So is the restriction even over? That's disputed too. Zelensky said two days ago that speeds still hadn't returned to where they were. A Ukrainian military contact told the Financial Times that full service had been restored. Wes Streeting, the UK's Defence Secretary, says he discussed it with Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, and welcomed the service coming back — but didn't get into why it was cut in the first place.
The Pentagon still hasn't explained any of this.
So three days after Ukraine's drone defences went dark with no warning, the two men who could explain why are both saying it wasn't them. And the paper with four contacts says it was both.
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