Elon Musk’s attempt to pin a deadly battlefield decision on President Donald Trump just got backing from an explosive new report.
The directive to throttle Starshield, the military-grade version of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite service on which Ukrainian troops rely, originated inside the White House, Reuters reported Thursday, citing two U.S. officials and a Western official who had been briefed on the matter.
According to officials, Defense Department leaders were sent a message instructing them to slow the service for Ukraine’s military. They did not say who in the White House gave the order or who carried it out.
The report lands a day after Musk publicly laid the blame at the president’s feet. Responding on X Wednesday to former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who had pressed him to lift the speed cap, the SpaceX chief insisted his company wasn’t calling the shots.
“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” Musk wrote.
The Trump administration pushed back Thursday. Asked about the order, a senior U.S. official told Reuters, “No such request was ever made by the president.” The White House didn’t answer questions about whether anyone else in the Trump administration was behind it.
A senior Ukrainian official told Reuters that Kyiv spent Tuesday and Wednesday calling senior officials at the White House, State Department and Pentagon looking for an explanation, and was told that the restriction was a White House decision.
The stakes are high. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told Piers Morgan Wednesday that people were killed because interceptor drones that depend on Starlink stopped working. Ukrainian officials said the slowdown also hampered strikes on Russian forces and supply lines. A Defense Ministry source told Reuters the receptors are functioning in motion again, but only up to 100 miles per hour.
The clampdown came as Trump has leaned on Kyiv to halt its attacks on Russian oil refineries, which he blames for rising energy prices heading into the midterms. 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 himself had backed Trump’s pressure campaign just days ago, sharing a clip of the president’s warning to Zelenskyy on October 10 with the comment, “Zelensky has gone too far.”
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