From Reuters:
"Musk ordered shutdown of Starlink satellite service as Ukraine retook territory from Russia
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.”
Ultimately,
Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeeded in reclaiming Beryslav, the city
of Kherson and some additional territory Russia had occupied. But Musk’s
order, which hasn’t previously been reported, is the first known
instance of the billionaire actively shutting off Starlink coverage over
a battlefield during the conflict. The decision shocked some Starlink
employees and effectively reshaped the front line of the fighting,
enabling Musk to take “the outcome of a war into his own hands,” another
one of the three people said.
The
account of the command counters Musk’s narrative of how he has handled
Starlink service in Ukraine amid 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 Nicolls didn’t respond to requests from Reuters for comment...
Musk’s order was an early glimpse of the power the magnate now wields in
geopolitics and global security because of Starlink, a fast-growing
satellite internet service that barely existed early this decade and now
provides connectivity even in remote areas of the world. Even before
his brief role as financial backer and advisor to U.S. President Donald
Trump, the success of Starlink – and the unrivaled connectivity it
offers across the planet – had given Musk increasing influence with
political leaders, governments and militaries worldwide.
Musk’s
sway in military affairs in Washington and beyond – through Starlink’s
dominance in satellite communications and SpaceX’s clout in space
launches – has reached a dimension previously limited to sovereign
governments, alarming some regulators and lawmakers. “Elon Musk’s
current global dominance exemplifies the dangers of concentrated power
in unregulated domains,” Martha Lane Fox, a member of Britain’s upper
house of parliament, said during a debate earlier this year. The
parliamentarian is a businesswoman and former board member at Twitter,
the social media site that Musk acquired in 2022 and rebranded as X.
“Its
control,” Lane Fox said of Starlink, “rests solely with Musk, allowing
his whims to dictate access to vital infrastructure.”...
SpaceX also said in 2023 that it had taken unspecified steps to prevent Ukraine from using Starlink
for certain activities, including drone attacks. “Our intent was never
to have them use it for offensive purposes,” Gwynne Shotwell, the
company’s president, said at a conference in Washington in February of
that year. “There are things that we can do, and have done” to prevent
it, she added, without providing further detail.
Reuters
couldn’t determine if the shutdown affecting Kherson was among the
steps she was referring to. Shotwell didn’t respond to requests for
comment for this article...
Musk himself has boasted of Starlink’s importance to Kyiv. “My Starlink
system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” he wrote on X in March.
“Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”"
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