Musk Says SpaceX Closed a Starlink 'Loophole' as Ukraine Reports Service Restored

Elon Musk said over the weekend that SpaceX had cut off what he called a "loophole" that let Ukraine's military use the company's civilian Starlink network for drone attacks, offering his first direct account of the curbs that disrupted Ukrainian operations for upward of a week. His posts came as Kyiv said the service was working normally again.

In a long post on X on Saturday, Musk wrote that offensive drone strikes had never been an allowed use of the commercial system. "Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people," he wrote. "That loophole was closed last week."

Hours later, replying to a post that described his remarks as an admission that SpaceX had throttled the service, Musk did not use that word but did not dispute the substance. "We simply enforced our terms of service when they were bypassed," he wrote, adding that the terms themselves had not changed. On Sunday he posted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had himself written about using Starlink for offensive strikes.

Musk did not explain why the company acted when it did, given that Ukraine's heavy reliance on the network has been public since early in the war.

Musk drew a line between Starlink and Starshield, a separate satellite service that SpaceX operates for the U.S. government and that Ukrainian drone units also use. Starshield, he wrote, is under Washington's control, and "what they decide to do is up to them." In an Oct. 14 post he had said that "any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS."

He also argued that Starlink is the only system Russia cannot jam or destroy, and that switching it off would make the Ukrainian front line "collapse immediately," which he called a statement of fact rather than a threat. In a later post he said the network must stay civilian, and that while it may support military infrastructure, "it cannot be used for unequivocally offensive strikes that make it fair game to be struck back." SpaceX, he wrote, "has done more to defend Ukraine than any private company on Earth BY FAR."

Ukrainian officials rejected his account. Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Zelensky on defense technology, said on Telegram that the commercial version of Starlink already runs under speed limits in Ukraine and does not function over Russian territory. "Therefore, we physically cannot use commercial Starlink for deep strikes and medium-range strikes," he wrote, calling it strange that Musk did not seem to know about those limits.

On Saturday, Ukraine's Defense Ministry said its monitoring showed both Starlink and Starshield back at full speed, with a stable link for drones and interceptors flying faster than 250 mph. During the outage, connections had dropped once a drone passed roughly 100 mph, which officials said hampered efforts to shoot down Russian drones and forced some missions to be scrapped.

"The speeds are now where they need to be," Zelensky wrote.

The episode played out during a wider dispute between the Ukrainian and U.S. governments about Kyiv's attacks on oil facilities inside Russia. Over the same stretch, President Donald Trump struck a deal for Russian diesel and waived some sanctions on Moscow.

Trump has repeatedly denied ordering any limits on the service. Last week, though, he said Musk had been told to "put it back," while declining to say who had made that call. Zelensky has said he believes the U.S. government had a role in the restrictions.

Ukraine leans on the two systems for front-line communications, for coordinating units in remote parts of the battlefield and for drone work, including intercepting the attack drones Russia launches at Ukrainian cities.

Russia is not permitted to use Starlink, so the network offers Ukraine no coverage for long-range drones or missiles sent deep into Russian territory to hit refineries.