Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had launched thousands of attacks this past week before Elon Musk’s SpaceX restored its Starlink and Starshield satellite internet service in the country. Zelensky said in an X post on Sunday that Moscow launched about 1,600 guided aerial bombs, 48 missiles, including ballistic missiles, and nearly 2,300 attack drones in the past week. It came a day after Zelensky said Ukraine’s access to Starlink and Starshield satellite links, which the country uses for military communications, drone operations and frontline logistics, had been restored to the speeds it had before restrictions were placed that disrupted frontline operations for more than a week.
Musk said Kyiv violated SpaceX’s commercial terms of service by using Starlink for offensive drone strikes—an allegation Ukrainian officials have denied. However, Musk noted that the U.S. government controls any operational changes to Starshield, the military-grade version of the service that serves as the backbone of Ukraine’s defense communication and drone network. President Donald Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have denied any administration involvement in the service disruptions.
Newsweek has contacted SpaceX and the White House, via email outside of normal working hours, for comment. Zelensky said four people were killed and another 22 injured, including an 11-year-old girl, in attacks on the Dnipropetrovsk region Saturday evening. Six people were injured after a drone strike on an apartment building in Vinnytsia and emergency workers were wounded in a repeat strike in Kharkiv, where “the Russians first struck a home improvement hypermarket and then carried out a cynical double-tap strike on the emergency services that arrived at the scene,” the Ukrainian president added.
Russia has not directly responded to these reports, but the Russian Defense Ministry said on Sunday it hit a logistics center in Kharkiv that was used for the storage and distribution of cargo for the Ukrainian military, reported. Newsweek contacted Russia’s ministry of defense via email on Sunday for comment. The attacks Zelensky described took place during a week when the restrictions on Starlink and Starshield services hampered Ukraine’s ability to intercept some Russian drones, according to Ukraine’s defense ministry.
Ukrainian officials said access to Starlink and Starshield had been restricted in the country without advance warning and that SpaceX had placed a speed limit on Starlink terminals earlier this month, disrupting battlefield operations. Ukraine has targeted Russian oil and gas facilities in an effort to curb energy revenue used to finance Moscow’s war. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Ukrainian refinery attacks have cost Russia roughly 1 percent of its gross domestic product.
Moscow, meanwhile, has continued targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Trump has pressured Ukraine to stop striking Russian oil facilities as high diesel prices remain an issue in the United States ahead of the midterms. Trump blamed Ukraine’s attacks for contributing to those prices, while his administration moved to allow Russian diesel back onto global markets and relaxed sanctions to authorize imports into the U.S.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
