President Donald Trump said Elon Musk has restored Ukraine's access to SpaceX's Starlink service, but Ukrainian officials said Friday that speed limits on the military-grade Starshield system remain in place, leaving frontline drone operations constrained and exposing a widening gap between Washington's account and conditions on the ground.
Trump, speaking to reporters at the White House on Friday, denied that he had called Musk about the matter, after saying a day earlier that "the bottom line — he put it back." Asked about the reported call, he said: "I don't want to comment on it, whether I called or whether somebody else called, doesn't make any difference, I guess." He added that if the problem has not been resolved, "I'll talk to him."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X on Friday that restrictions on Starlink and Starshield "remain in place" and that connection speeds have not recovered. The limits, he said, are making combat harder, though Ukrainian forces are holding the line. Kyiv is also still waiting for interceptor missiles that the United States had previously agreed to supply.
Since Oct. 14, Ukrainian officials have alleged that SpaceX capped speeds on Starshield terminals, causing drones traveling faster than 100 miles per hour to lose their connection and disrupting some missions. Starshield is a Pentagon-funded, military version of Starlink that Ukrainian forces rely on for battlefield communications and drone operations against Russia.
Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Washington think tank Silverado Policy Accelerator and a co-founder of cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, said Ukraine is losing drones as a result and that its ability to strike Russian logistics has been curtailed. Serhii Beskrestnov, Zelenskyy's adviser on defense technology, confirmed on Telegram that the restrictions remain in effect. While isolated cases suggest Starlink may operate slightly beyond the existing limits, that is more likely a function of SpaceX's algorithms or specific usage conditions and should not be read as the cap being lifted, he said.
Denys Sienik, Ukraine's deputy ambassador to the United States, said Kyiv is still waiting for the limits to be removed so frontline units can get the capabilities they need to protect lives, and that as of Friday nothing had changed.
The conflicting accounts follow a Wall Street Journal report that Trump had phoned Musk to press him to lift the restrictions, citing U.S. officials, who said the system was working more normally on Thursday shortly after the call. The newspaper had reported earlier in the week that Musk, a critic of Zelenskyy, ordered the slowdown. Trump has repeatedly denied involvement in the decision and said he does not know who was responsible. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that SpaceX and Musk, not the White House, made the decisions about Ukraine's access.
It remains unclear who ordered the restrictions. The episode has drawn congressional attention: Democratic lawmakers have called for an investigation into Musk and the Starshield slowdown, and a bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Thursday urging the Pentagon to move quickly to expand Starshield arrangements and ensure Ukraine receives uninterrupted satellite communications. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, the ranking member of the Senate homeland security committee's investigations subcommittee, opened an inquiry into how the technology was "degraded for Ukraine without notice," saying in letters to Musk and Hegseth that the decision "not only put Ukrainian forces at risk and their people in peril, but raises serious questions about who controls critical capabilities the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars to procure." Sen. John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, told CNBC that he does not believe Musk would throttle Starlink without "at least the acquiescence of the White House."
With service still limited, Kyiv is courting alternatives. Zelenskyy said he met Wednesday with Norwegian officials and defense company Kongsberg to discuss air defense systems and the development of new satellite communications capabilities for Ukrainian forces. Ukraine's defense ministry signed a letter of intent Thursday with Nokia and Finnish space intelligence firm ICEYE to explore cooperation in space and help build satellite communications capacity that Ukraine controls itself. Experts have cautioned that no other service currently matches Starlink, making a near-term substitute difficult.
"Modern warfare has proven that reliable communications are a matter of national security," Zelenskyy said in his statement. "We must all rely on capabilities we can control ourselves."
The standoff underscores how much of a sovereign nation's battlefield capability now rests on infrastructure supplied by a single private company. SpaceX accounts for roughly 90% of all mass launched into orbit, Musk said on the company's recent earnings call, and the Pentagon is Starshield's largest customer. Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center for Technology Innovation, said the arrangement gives Musk leverage few individuals have ever held: "He can turn a country's communications on or off — that's an extraordinary power. Even governments can't do that."
Gautam Mukunda, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and managing director of consultancy Two Rivers Group, put it more bluntly, saying there is "a very real chance" Musk is "the most powerful civilian, non-governmental actor in history," with resources "vastly larger than those of all but a handful of governments on the planet." Adam Segal, the Council on Foreign Relations' Ira A. Lipman Chair in Emerging Technologies and National Security, said Washington has chosen to outsource capabilities it once built itself, and that the resulting dependence on commercial technology "is going to be very hard to put back in the bottle."
The dispute is unfolding against a broader deterioration in Washington-Kyiv relations, as Trump pushes to end Russia's war and has moved to ease sanctions so Moscow can supply some diesel to global markets. Russia launched ballistic missile attacks on Kyiv while Ukraine sent hundreds of drones toward Moscow on Thursday.
For investors, the episode adds a geopolitical variable to the Musk complex. SpaceX (SPCX) rose 1.89% on Friday to close at $147.49 a share, trading between $144.08 and $149.75 during the session, with a market value of about $2 trillion. The stock is down 1.16% for the week. SpaceX and Tesla (TSLA) teams are reportedly pursuing an aggressive timeline to merge the two companies before the 2028 presidential election while allies remain in the White House, according to Yahoo Finance. Musk responded publicly on Wednesday to reports of a potential investigation, writing on X: "Live by the sword, die by the sword. Those who pick fights with me should understand that I will find out who is really pulling the strings and come for them, not just their puppets."
Note: Speed and restriction details are as described by Ukrainian officials; SpaceX has not publicly confirmed the terms of any cap.