In Ukraine the situation was already jittery enough. Donald Trump has been inventing ceasefires and buying Russian diesel to shore up his flagging popularity, while a sinister new wave of faster, jet-powered drones are breaking through Kyiv’s stretched air defences. Casualties are rising as the weather turns.
Overnight, Russia bombed three power plants that supply Kyiv, aiming to cut off heating and electricity to the city. According to the president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy , for a second night in a row no warning came from Ukraine’s western allies of the incoming ballistic missiles – and so no air raid alert was issued.
Then, on Tuesday night, and without warning, Ukraine’s military found that Elon Musk’s Starlink mobile internet system, on which it heavily relies, had stopped working on its drones flying faster than 160km/h (100mph).
Or at least that was the official limit: in practice, drones flying over 80km/h could no longer communicate.
The immediate assumption in Kyiv is that the White House is once again trying to bully Ukraine into accepting an unattractive deal with Russia .
However, on Tuesday Trump did say that no intelligence-sharing had been paused, and similar comments were made by Mark Rutte, the secretary general of Nato on Wednesday. It is possible the lack of ballistic warning is coincidental.
Even Serhii Beskrestnov, Zelenskyy’s high-profile military technology adviser, has expressed public doubts about whether the US had paused the sharing of missile detection. “Friends, this is not the first time that the launch of an S-400 has not been detected,” he posted on Monday. “We should not jump to conclusions.”
However, there has now been an absence of incoming warnings for two days in a row. The second of these was in tandem with the unexpected throttling of Starlink , a system supplied by Musk with the approval of the US military.
So it is hardly reassuring against the backdrop of White House threats, which have emerged every time a flailing Trump has tried to end the war in Ukraine.
The last time Trump paused intelligence-sharing – which is, in effect, valuable information about Russian positions and movements – was in March 2025, shortly after Zelenskyy’s infamous dusting down in the Oval Office.
“You don’t have the cards,” Trump said, as he took another away. Ukraine rapidly lost a chunk of territory it had occupied in Russia’s Kursk region before sharing was restored.
A confirmed pause this time would mark a serious breach when Ukraine is more than holding off its larger neighbour on the frontline, even as the situation on the home front is worsening.
Russia has bombed two bridges in Kyiv , gas stations, city centre buildings and out-of-town warehouses, showing little restraint as it aims to harm Ukrainian civilians while it struggles to win the conventional war.
The effect of a more permanent halt to Starlink for Ukrainian drones or anything military that moves faster than 50mph is a little more complex. Starlink is how Ukraine directs many of its mid-strike (or mid-range) drones accurately towards their targets into occupied areas behind enemy lines, critical for helping the defenders maintain the rough balance on the front.
Yet, ironically, Starlink is not used for the long-range missions that target the Russian oil refineries about which Trump is so concerned, because it has long been disabled by the company inside Russia’s internationally recognised borders.
“There’s no meaningful effect on deep-strike operations,” one Ukrainian soldier said, while conceding there could be as much as a 30-fold drop in mid-strike operations because the alternatives are 30 times more expensive. Commanders are “replanning everything”, the soldier added, and aiming to find ways to carry on missions using different technologies and techniques.
Starlink is also, more importantly – as Beskrestnov emphasised on Wednesday – used by air-defence interceptors in the most effective system to down Russia’s deadly new jet-powered Shahed drones. These are at least twice as fast as traditional piston-engined Shaheds, and Ukraine’s rate of interception had dropped to 60% in September, before recovering to 75% according to the country’s air force.
The reality, then, is that the Starlink manoeuvre may not have much impact on oil prices, and only a limited effect on Ukraine’s frontline position, while putting the country’s civilians in greater danger.
As the Ukrainian human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk put it: “Without that protection, Russian drones will strike residential buildings, hospitals and schools like targets in a shooting gallery.”
Meanwhile, diplomatically, the situation is more finely poised. It was already the case that the Trump White House had proved to be a difficult and unreliable partner. What Zelenskyy, on a visit to London on Wednesday, needs from the likes of the UK prime minster, Andy Burnham, is pressure on the US to ensure the Starlink pause and whatever is happening with intelligence-sharing does not metastasise into a deeper crisis.
