Trump denies any involvement in Starlink outage in Ukraine

US President Donald Trump has said he had nothing to do with the recent outage of Starlink satellite communications in Ukraine. “I don’t know if it was anybody, because it wasn’t me. And I don’t think it was Elon. As far as I know, everything is as usual,” he told reporters when asked whether he or billionaire Elon Musk had restricted the Ukrainian army’s access to the technology.

Strictly speaking, the Ukrainian military does not use commercial Starlink but the military Starshield system, built on the same technology.

What happened

On Wednesday, amid growing tension between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian authorities said that Musk’s company SpaceX had restricted the terminals used by Ukrainian forces, thereby disrupting their operations. Musk himself rejected this, saying that only the US military or Trump could restrict the Starshield system.

On Thursday, Ukrainian media, citing the army, reported that Starshield was starting to work again at the front. On Friday in Brussels, Zelensky said that SpaceX satellite communications in Ukraine had improved but were not yet fully restored.

Starshield and Starlink: what’s the difference

Starshield is a platform that SpaceX began developing for governments, primarily the US government. In 2023, the Pentagon purchased Starshield terminals and services for the Ukrainian government. The line between Starlink and Starshield is not entirely clear-cut: ordinary Starlink terminals can be used for Starshield, and military satellites can also communicate securely with commercial ones. Put simply, these are separate services and software, but with a shared technological base, running on the same devices.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz