SpaceX stops Russia’s ‘unauthorised’ use of Starlink, Elon Musk says

Elon Musk said on Sunday that SpaceX had successfully thwarted the “unauthorised use” by Russia’s military of his company’s Starlink satellite system to attack Ukraine.

“Looks like the steps we took to stop the unauthorised use of Starlink by Russia have worked,” Musk wrote on X. “Let us know if more needs to be done.”

Ukrainian defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov replied saying the “first steps are already delivering real results”. “We are working very closely with your team on the next important steps,” he added in a post on Musk’s social media platform.

Earlier this week, Fedorov said that “within a few hours after Russian drones equipped with Starlink communications appeared over Ukrainian cities” his ministry had begun working with SpaceX to stop the weapons from using the US internet system to guide them to targets inside Ukraine. 

Musk’s assistance comes as the Trump administration pushes for an end to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The first three-way peace talks between American, Russian and Ukrainian delegations were held a week ago. The negotiations were scheduled to resume on Sunday, but were postponed to February 4 and 5, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Russia has insisted it will not end its war in Ukraine unless Kyiv makes significant territorial concessions, which the US has tied to security guarantees for the country, the FT reported.

On Saturday, US special envoy Steve Witkoff held what he called a “productive and constructive” meeting with Russian special envoy Kirill Dmitriev in Miami. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, Jared Kushner and White House senior adviser Josh Gruenbaum joined the talks, Witkoff said.

Meanwhile, Russian drones continued to attack Ukraine by the hundreds. But since Thursday they have refrained from attacking energy infrastructure in and around Kyiv, after US President Donald Trump asked Russia’s Vladimir Putin to agree to a week-long ceasefire.

The Kremlin clarified that Putin had agreed to hold fire through Sunday only — just before temperatures were expected to plummet to about minus 30°C and with the Ukrainian energy grid still damaged by previous attacks.

Serhiy Beskrestnov, an adviser to Ukraine’s defence minister, last month said he had discovered Starlink dishes in wreckage of hundreds of Russia’s long-range drones that were used in swarms to strike energy infrastructure and residential buildings. The dishes were found atop the drones where they had a direct link to Starlink’s constellation of satellites, allowing them to fly farther and largely unhindered by electronic warfare devices used by Kyiv to bring them down.

Beskrestnov said on Thursday that these were attacks “not on military targets” but on civilian urban areas, “including residential buildings”.

On Saturday, Beskrestnov wrote on Facebook that SpaceX’s countermeasures against Russia’s drones were showing results but that they had also impacted the use of Starlink by some of Ukraine’s own military units. He said that a solution was being developed to ensure Ukrainian use would be fully restored.

Tens of thousands of Starlink terminals are being used by the Ukrainian military and the civilian population alike. The internet system has been crucial for communications and drone operations conducted by the armed forces. But it has also provided a lifeline to frontline communities without telecommunications and to neighbourhoods in Kyiv whose power and WiFi have been knocked out by Russian bombing.

Starlink cannot be sold to or operated inside Russia because of US sanctions on the country over its full-scale war on Ukraine. But Russian forces have found ways around the ban and were first reported to be using Starlink systems in 2024.

But Ukraine’s heavy reliance on Starlink and concerns over Musk’s past criticism of Kyiv and decisions that interrupted military operations have raised concerns in Europe, where companies are rushing to find viable alternatives. 

Concerns were first raised in October 2022, after the FT reported that Ukrainian troops had suffered outages of their Starlink communication devices on the frontline, hindering operations to liberate territory from Russian forces. Musk has said that “Starlink is meant for peaceful use only”.

Fedorov noted that the tech billionaire’s “decision to urgently activate Starlink and send the first batch of terminals to Ukraine at the start of the full-scale invasion was critically important for the resilience of our state”.

He called Musk “a true champion of freedom and a true friend of the Ukrainian people”.