The decision interrupted a counteroffensive and led to the confidence of kyiv in the servicepreviously provided by Musk to help the Ukrainian military maintain connectivity on the battlefield.
According to three people familiar with the command, Musk told a senior engineer at the California offices of Spacex, the company that controls Starlink, to cut the coverage in areas that included Kherson, Strategic region that Ukraine tried to recover.
Elon Musk cut Starlink for Ukraine in the middle of the war
“We have to do this”, Said Starlink engineer Michael Nicolls to his colleagues upon receiving the order, according to one of the sources.
The three people consulted agreed that The staff complied with the order and deactivated at least a hundred Starlink terminals. Then, Ukrainian troops found a communications blackout, According to military agents.
One of the consequences of the blackout was that the long -range artillery units, dependent on Starlink to aim, had difficulty giving in the target.
As a result, according to Ukrainian military, The troops failed to surround a Russian position in the city of Beryslav, located east of Kherson, administrative center of the region of the same name. “The fence stagged completely,” said the military in an interview. “Failure”.
In the end, the Ukrainian counteroffensive managed to recover Berslav, Kherson and other territories. But Musk’s order is the first known case in which the billionaire actively closed the Starlink coverage on a battlefield during the conflict.
The decision shocked some Starlink employees and in fact reconfigured the first combat line, allowing Musk to take “the result of a war in their own hands,” said another of the three people.
The command story counteracts Musk’s narrative on how the Starlink service in Ukraine has managed during the war. As recently as in March, in an X post, Musk wrote: “We would never do such a thing.”
Russia and Ukraine agreed a new exchange of prisoners although there was no high fire agreement
More than three years from the beginning of the war, Russia and Ukraine They specified on Wednesday their third round of negotiations where they agreed a new exchange of prisoners, although There were no advances in agreements to end the conflict.
From kyiv, They proposed a meeting between the presidents Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, and Russia, Vladimir Putinbefore the end of August to bring the negotiations to a new stage although from Moscow They rejected the initiative, which also included an invitation for the presidents of Türkiye and the United States, Rece Tayyip Erdogan and Donald Trumprespectively.
Source: Ambito
