What the Loss of Starshield Revealed

Starlink and its military-grade counterpart, Starshield, have become indispensable to Ukraine’s armed forces.

That much became clear this week, when a sudden outage plunged Ukraine’s air defenses into semidarkness.

As one Ukrainian officer told Politico , “This is comparable to a nuclear strike against us.

All operations are on hold.” Ukraine uses Starshield to control drones via secure internet.

These include interceptor drones as well as other short- and medium-range drones inside Ukraine.

This week, Starshield connectivity abruptly cut out as soon as Ukrainian drones or vehicles began to move faster than 100 miles an hour (and, in some cases, well short of that threshold), making the interception of incoming Russian fire virtually impossible.

As of Thursday morning, Starshield service was reportedly restored.

But the outage revealed a vulnerability that hasn’t gone away.

Russia has been hitting Ukrainian energy infrastructure with drones and missiles every winter since the war began and has made clear that it intends to begin targeting water infrastructure as well.

Ukraine’s primary counter to Russian drones has been a fleet of small, cheap, fast drones controlled remotely by operators on the ground using Starshield.

Without access to these high-speed data links, Ukraine loses most of its defensive capability. [ Read: Zelensky asked Trump for a favor from Elon Musk ] Without Starshield, Ukraine also loses its “middle strike” capability.

The military deploys drones to hit moving targets as near as 20 and as far as 125 miles behind the front lines, with the goal of disrupting Russian logistics, particularly by destroying fuel trucks.

Ukraine has been blowing up more than 700 supply trucks a month , leaving Russian troops short on fuel and other necessities .

To a lesser extent, the throttling of data could also affect Ukraine’s front-line tactics, which involve the use of drones against infantry and small vehicles near the front.