London, July 27: Billionaire Elon Musk directed the temporary deactivation of Starlink satellite coverage over part of Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast during Kyiv’s major counteroffensive in the autumn of 2022, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
According to the sources, Musk instructed a senior SpaceX engineer to shut down connectivity near Beryslav, where Ukrainian forces were attempting to encircle Russian troops. The outage reportedly grounded reconnaissance drones and disrupted artillery coordination, contributing directly to the failure of the encirclement operation, a Ukrainian military source said.
Despite the blackout, Ukrainian forces ultimately liberated Kherson and other settlements on the west bank of the Dnipro River in November 2022. However, the interruption alarmed military officials in Kyiv and Washington at the time, the sources added.
Musk has previously denied ever disabling Starlink terminals. In March, he wrote on X, “To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals.”
Reuters’ sources said Musk was motivated by concerns that a decisive Ukrainian advance might provoke a Russian nuclear response. SpaceX, which operates Starlink, did not publicly confirm the incident.
The report comes a day after Starlink suffered a global outage on July 24, underscoring the service’s central role in Ukraine’s wartime communications infrastructure. Hospitals, schools and front-line military units across the country rely heavily on its connectivity.
