Reuters Report Links Starshield Slowdown Order to White House as Musk Points to Trump
A Reuters report citing U.S. and Western officials says the order to throttle SpaceX's Starshield service for Ukraine originated inside the White House, a day after Elon Musk publicly said limits on the system are ultimately decided by the U.S. military and the president.
The directive to slow Starshield, the military-grade satellite service that Ukrainian forces rely on for battlefield communications, came from inside the White House, according to a Reuters report published Thursday that cited two U.S. officials and a Western official briefed on the matter. The finding lands one day after Elon Musk publicly insisted that his company does not control the system and that any restrictions are ultimately decided by the U.S. military and the president.
According to the officials, Defense Department leaders received a message instructing them to slow the service for Ukraine's military. The report did not identify who inside the White House issued the order or who carried it out, leaving key questions about the chain of command unanswered. The Trump administration pushed back Thursday. A senior U.S. official told Reuters, «No such request was ever made by the president.» The White House did not respond to questions about whether anyone else in the administration was behind the restriction.
Musk's public comments came Wednesday on X, where he responded to former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had pressed him to lift the speed cap. The SpaceX chief wrote that «Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government» and that «any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.» His statement effectively placed responsibility for the slowdown at the president's feet, a position now bolstered by the Reuters account of the order's origin.
The human and military stakes are significant. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Piers Morgan on Wednesday that people were killed because interceptor drones dependent on Starlink stopped working. Ukrainian officials said the slowdown also hampered strikes on Russian forces and supply lines, reducing the military's ability to target enemy positions and logistics.
A senior Ukrainian official told Reuters that Kyiv spent Tuesday and Wednesday calling senior officials at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon seeking an explanation, and was told the restriction was a White House decision. A Defense Ministry source said the receptors are functioning in motion again, but only up to 100 miles per hour, a partial restoration that still leaves a significant operational limit in place.
The clampdown unfolded as President Donald Trump has pressed Kyiv to halt attacks on Russian oil refineries, which he blames for rising energy prices ahead of the midterm elections. At an October 9 meeting in Miami, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner and envoy Steve Witkoff took a hard line with Ukrainian officials over the strikes, according to a person familiar with the matter. Musk had backed that pressure campaign just days earlier, sharing a clip of the president's warning to Zelenskyy on October 10 with the comment, «Zelensky has gone too far.»
The episode has thrust the intersection of private satellite infrastructure and government decision-making into public view. Starshield is owned and controlled by the U.S. government, but it is built and operated by SpaceX, creating a gray zone in which a private company's chief executive and federal officials can each point to the other when politically sensitive limits are imposed. For Ukrainian troops, the practical effect is measured in lost drone missions and degraded targeting, while in Washington the dispute has become a test of who authorized a restriction that Kyiv says cost lives.
9
