Starlink Shutdown Blunts Russia’s Newest Battlefield Advantage
Limits have hobbled Russia’s use of drone-mounted terminals that had begun to ravage Ukrainian supply lines
KYIV, Ukraine—Russian drone teams had turned the road supplying Ukrainian troops in the embattled city of Pokrovsk into a terrifying gantlet. Their secret weapon: Elon Musk’s Starlink internet terminals.
Russians piloted cheap drones, jury-rigged with smuggled Starlinks, from a safe distance to smash into Ukrainian vehicles, aiding their advances this winter.
Then, Musk’s SpaceX, which produces Starlink, disabled unauthorized Russian access to the satellite internet terminals, and the results were rapid, according to Ukrainian soldiers fighting at the front.
“When Starlink shut off, silence fell,” said a Ukrainian radio-electronic support specialist in the country’s east, who goes by the call sign Kocherha.
Starlink isn’t activated in Russia. Middlemen smuggled the terminals through a black market to Russian troops who operated them in Ukraine to deadly effect.
Though other types of drone attack persisted, SpaceX’s move, which Musk touted on his X social-media platform, curbed the latest battlefield advantage for Moscow at a critical moment in the four-year war. It has also set Russian forces on a desperate hunt for alternatives and workarounds to get the Starlink connections back online.
Russians sought Ukrainians online to activate their Starlinks in return for small crypto payments. Ukrainian online activists said they took advantage. One group said Thursday it had tricked Russian servicemen by offering to activate their Starlinks for payments, but instead transferred the data it garnered on 2,420 terminals to Ukrainian authorities. The activists said they redirected thousands of dollars they received in the process to support the Ukrainian military.
Russia is targeting gains at the front that would bolster its position in peace talks mediated by the Trump administration. Medium-range explosive drones that Russia produces at industrial scale have enabled the Kremlin’s forces to damage Ukrainian infrastructure supplying the front lines, helping Russia eke out advances in some areas even as the front line is largely at a standstill.
The road from Pavlohrad to Pokrovsk has been an important target for the Russian military in recent weeks as Moscow seeks a signature victory in the city that it has made a priority of capturing for two years.
Kyiv
UKRAINE
Severodonetsk
Slovyansk
UKRAINE
Supply Road
Pavlohrad
Dnipro
Debaltseve
Horlivka
Pokrovsk
Donetsk
Zaporizhzhia
RUSSIAN FORCES
RUSSIA
50 miles
50 km
Mariupol
Russian forces attacked the road using basic fixed-wing drones known as Molniya, or Lightning, with electric motors that can either detonate their own payload of up to 22 pounds or carry two or three small explosive drones, extending the range.
At the end of last year, Ukraine’s military intelligence indicated that Starlink terminals were being mounted on top of the drones by Russian forces to transmit video signals and provide real-time guidance. That practice meant the drones could be controlled remotely by pilots far from the targets; it also gave the unmanned aerial vehicles a range limited only by battery life and not the extent of their radio signal.
In late January, a Ukrainian soldier who goes by the call sign Irlandets, or Irishman, said he sped west along the route toward Pavlohrad at around 100 miles an hour to avoid becoming a target. On his way, about 30 miles from Russian positions, he passed burned-out supply trucks, including those loaded with gasoline and bread. Some were still ablaze in the night, he said.
Kocherha, the radio-electronic support specialist whose call sign means fire poker, said that over two days at least six trucks were destroyed on the road. Unverified footage posted by Russia’s elite drone unit Rubicon showed drones hitting trucks on what they described as the M-04 road to Pavlohrad.
The cost of the drone-mounted devices—around $500 to $800 for a drone and $300 to $500 for Starlink, according to Ukrainian military estimates—made them an efficient tool for Russia. Ukrainian servicemen this winter said that Russia was scaling up their use and that the devices would have a significant impact on the front lines if Ukraine couldn’t counter them.
The situation changed earlier this month, after Ukraine’s defense minister reached out to SpaceX. The U.S. company later said it had stopped the “unauthorized use” of Starlink by Russian forces in Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said Space X responded quickly after it warned that Russia was using its technology “to terrorize the civilian population of Ukraine.”
The solution involved creating a list for terminals registered with Ukrainian authorities, the Defense Ministry said. Only those Starlinks would be enabled in Ukraine by SpaceX.
SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The shutdown didn’t only reduce Russian drone strikes. On the front lines, it also partially blinded Russian command posts and drone crews that relied on Starlink for communication, livestreams and more-precise control of assaults as commanders got real-time footage of combat, said Oleksandr Solonko, who serves with a Ukrainian drone unit in the Pokrovsk area.
Ukraine took advantage of the lull in attacks to evacuate the wounded, a major challenge during a war in which any vehicle near the front lines can fall prey to drones, said Bohdan Zhelobchuk, who is a consultant for Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian charity that supplies the military and regularly visits units at the front. Russian military channels have reported Ukrainian counterattacks in southern parts of the front since Starlink was cut off.
A Ukrainian military spokesman responsible for the southern front said the operations there aimed to repel the Russian infiltration groups from Ukrainian villages and were a part of defense maneuvers.
He said the drone attacks there decreased by as much as 15% after Starlink was cut off, which coincided with weather changes and a regrouping of Russian forces in the south.
Russia is scrambling to find a replacement. Moscow has its own satellite internet terminals, known as Yamal and Express. Ukrainian officials said they are of a lower quality, would take a while to deploy at scale, and use much larger satellite dishes that are easier for Ukraine’s military to spot and destroy.
An immediate solution is labor-intensive. To expand the range of its operations, Russia also uses a network of drones to transmit radio signals. Additional crews and drones are needed for that compared with a single Starlink-equipped weapon.
Russia is seeking Ukrainian citizens to register terminals in their names, according to Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU. The agency sent a message to Ukrainians warning about any such attempts and asking citizens to report them.
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