BERLIN — Russian troops fighting in Ukraine have reported loss of internet signal via Starlink satellite, according to pro-war military blogs in Russia. The block came after Elon Musk responded to a request from the Ukrainian government to restrict access to the system, which was being used clandestinely by Russian soldiers.
The cut is another chapter in a war that has lasted almost four years and has become a permanent technological race, redefining what it means to fight a conflict in the 21st century.
It is not yet clear how much damage will be done to the Russian army, but bloggers who closely follow the troops report irritation and communication failures on the front line, where Moscow’s military personnel have been using smuggled Starlink equipment to access the internet for years.
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“It’s too early to measure the full impact, but given the level of Russian complaints, it’s already making a difference,” says Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
A blogger identified as Military Informant, on Telegram, stated that both Starlink connections used on drones and access to the network by troops on the front line were interrupted. The Russians recently started using Starlink in some drones — a key part of this war —, but Ukraine feared that this would become standard and further increase the efficiency of attacks.
According to this blogger, the change could push Russian forces back to technologies considered “of the past”, such as wired internet, Wi-Fi and radio.
“The Starlink soap opera has opened a serious breach in communications, which the enemy may try to exploit,” posted the Colonelcassad channel, run by pro-war blogger Boris Rozhin, also on Telegram. He notes that there is currently no other internet solution in the field that offers the same performance, and that circumventing the blockade will take time.
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After the cut, Musk wrote on
While Ukraine has always had official access to Starlink, Russia has been circumventing export restrictions to bring equipment from the American company and distribute it among units on the battlefront.
In recent months, however, the Ukrainian government realized that Russian use was going beyond simple communication between troops. According to Kiev, Russia started attaching Starlink to drones, improving the precision of attacks and reducing the effect of signal jammers.
This dispute fits into a central point of the war: the race for more sophisticated drones and robots and for increasingly secure communication channels to control them. The prospect of floods of Russian drones powered by Starlink has raised alarm in Kiev, which is already facing a heavy campaign of Russian attacks on energy infrastructure in one of the harshest winters in recent years.
Given this, the new Ukrainian Defense Minister, Mykhailo Fedorov — a 35-year-old former technology entrepreneur — approached SpaceX, owner of Starlink, last month. The response was a broad tightening: the company started to block the service in Ukraine for all terminals that were not registered and validated by the government.
In practice, Ukraine created a “white list” of authorized devices, leaving out smuggled terminals used by Russian troops. The measure, however, also ended up temporarily affecting Ukrainian civilians and military personnel who had not yet registered or were awaiting approval.
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Fedorov celebrated the change in a post on X on Thursday, saying that the new system is working and that the country continues to validate terminals quickly. He thanked Musk and stated that the decision “is bringing concrete results”.
“We are working very closely with your team on the next important steps,” the minister wrote to the owner of SpaceX. “Thank you for being by our side. You are a true defender of freedom and a true friend of the Ukrainian people.”
SpaceX did not comment publicly on the case on Thursday.
In addition to the registration requirement, Starlink terminals operating in Ukraine now have a speed limit of around 75 km/h. In other words, if equipment is installed in weapons that move faster than that, the connection drops — a way of making it difficult to use in long-range attack drones.
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According to Kofman, the Ukrainian objective is twofold. Mandatory registration, he says, “forces Russian forward units to reorganize their communications,” which gives Ukraine an advantage. The speed limit serves “to prevent Russia from using the system on long-range attack drones”.
The expert considers that the Russians still have communication alternatives, such as terrestrial internet, fiber optic cables, Wi-Fi bridges and repeaters — technologies that existed before dependence on Starlink.
Analysts see Moscow’s recent attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as a form of pressure as delegations from the two countries meet in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, for peace talks mediated by the United States.
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Since the start of the large-scale invasion in 2022, the Russian Army has had difficulty setting up a field communication system that is both secure and reliable. At various times, units ended up turning to Starlink to coordinate movements on the front line. Russia is racing to launch its own satellite constellation, but the project is still in development.
Without Starlink, “the enemy doesn’t just have a problem, the enemy has a catastrophe,” Fedorov’s aide Serhiy Beskrestnov wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.
Faced with the blackout, Russian units returned to using radios and other more traditional means of communication. Some started installing fiber optic cables to take fixed internet to the front line as a plan B, according to reports from Russian military bloggers.
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