By Kate Sullivan, Ellen Milligan and Sana Pashankar
President Donald Trump didn’t order any limitations on Ukraine’s access to SpaceX’s Starshield satellite technology, according to a senior US official.
Asked whether the US president had ordered restrictions on Ukraine’s use of Starshield, the official said Thursday no such request was ever made by the president.
The US official’s comment didn’t preclude the possibility that another US official or agency directed Kyiv’s access be curbed, but it does rebut Zelenskyy’s claim that Trump was responsible.
The disruption, which has since been restored, has ignited a firestorm over who controls the SpaceX technology on the front lines of Ukraine, which is used for military communications and operations, including to pilot drones and target artillery fires.
The restriction has prompted intense backlash from governments across the world and lawmakers, who are seeking answers from SpaceX and the US government to understand who made the call to throttle the service and why.
It also raises questions about remarks Musk has made after Zelenskyy and other European officials said he was complicit in the Starshield disruptions. Musk on Wednesday posted to his social media platform X that “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”
Starshield is a militarized version of Starlink that has become a key component of Ukraine’s war in Russia. While the US government does have a Starshield network that it owns and operates, SpaceX also offers Starshield as a military-grade communications service that relies on the company’s own Starlink satellite network.
SpaceX controls the systems associated with Starlink, and a person familiar told Bloomberg Wednesday that SpaceX had limited terminal connections. The person asked to not be identified in order to discuss private decisions.
Musk’s comments on X, however, sought to shift responsibility away from his company by only referring to Starshield as the US government-owned hardware.
UK Defense Secretary Wes Streeting, who met his US counterpart Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon on Thursday, told the BBC, “It’s not yet clear to us in the UK what happened, why the service interruption occurred.”
Hegseth and the Pentagon haven’t yet commented on the issue.
The Ukrainian leader’s accusation escalated tensions with the US after last week’s deal for diesel exports between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. That pact has been assailed by critics as an economic bailout for Moscow with little impact on soaring fuel prices in the US.
Trump has railed at both sides, though he’s trained most of his anger on Zelenskyy in recent weeks.
“I’m not a big fan of Zelenskyy,” Trump said in an interview with Newsmax that aired late Thursday, fuming at his decision to restart strikes on Russia’s energy infrastructure and urging Ukraine to hold elections that the country’s leader has rejected as impractical while fighting continues.
Musk has used his X social media platform to amplify his views on Ukraine, saying on Wednesday, “Time for Zelensky to go.”
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in 2023 that the company had limited the use of Starlink on Ukrainian drones and that the technology “was never meant to be weaponized.”
A year earlier, Musk denied a request to activate Starlink near Crimea, a Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, and reportedly ordered a shutdown of the service in another instance.
“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk wrote on X about the denied request.
