Tech and AI

Ukraine says Starlink and Starshield are back to full speed after a week in which its drones lost their link above 160 km/h

By Staff Writer  |  25 October 2026

The defence ministry is recording stable connections at more than 400 km/h, while Elon Musk says SpaceX closed what he called a loophole and it is still unclear who ordered the limits.

Ukraine says its Starlink and Starshield connections are back to the speeds it had before the restrictions of the past week. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that the restoration began overnight, and the defence ministry said its own monitoring systems confirmed it. In his post the President thanked Americans, including members of Congress, the State Department and President Trump, and said the speeds mattered for logistics at the front and for defending against jet-powered attack drones.

For more than a week, drones using the services lost their connection once they passed about 160 km/h, or 100 miles an hour. Ukrainian officials said the cap made it harder to intercept incoming attack drones and forced some operations to be called off. Starshield is the military version of the Starlink network run by SpaceX, and Ukraine relies on both for drone operations, logistics and communications at the front.

The most important thing today is that Starlink and Starshield operations have been restored to the speeds we had before the restrictions. The speeds are now where they need to be.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine

What the ministry is measuring

Yevhenii Khmara, the Defence Minister, told reporters that the ministry was recording speeds above 400 km/h and that the connection was stable. He credited direct talks led by the President for the result and said the ministry would keep tracking how the services perform.

The accounts of who decided on the limits still conflict. On 14 October Musk wrote that any limits on Starshield were decided by the US military and ultimately by the President. President Trump said on Thursday that Musk had put the service back, and on Friday declined to say who had ordered the change, telling reporters he would not say if he knew. He and the US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, have both denied that the Pentagon directed any change.

Musk gives his account

Shortly after Ukraine announced the restoration, Musk wrote that SpaceX had restricted the service on purpose. He said Ukraine's military had breached the Starlink terms of service by using the civilian network for offensive drone strikes, and that the loophole had been closed last week. He repeated that changes to Starshield were directed by the US government.

The restoration answers the speed question for now, but who ordered the limits, and on what authority, is still unclear.

The week has shown how much of Ukraine's drone warfare runs over one company's network. This week Kyiv also signed a letter of intent for a satellite system it would own, but the first satellite under that work is not due to launch before 2028.