News

FT: Ukrainian military complains about Starlink disruptions on the front line, it complicates deoccupation

Author:
Oleg Panfilovych
Date:

The Ukrainian military spoke about the "critical failures" of Elon Muskʼs satellite communication, which hinder the offensive.

The Financial Times writes about it.

A senior Ukrainian government official told the paper that some of the outages had led to a "catastrophic" loss of communications in recent weeks. Ukrainian soldiers have encountered outages of Starlink systems while advancing into Russian-occupied territory and even directly during combat. The biggest disruptions occurred in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, as well as communication problems near Kharkiv in the Donetsk and Luhansk directions.

Another official confirmed that the outages were widespread and added that communication problems had caused "panic calls from soldiers to helplines". Both FT spokespeople said problems arose when troops crossed the front line and entered territory previously controlled by Russia.

The failures were also confirmed by three soldiers operating on the front line. One of them noted that the terminals in his units had not worked in the recently liberated territory of the Kharkiv region in recent days. Two other interlocutors said that in recent days the communication east of Izyum and in the Kherson region had been working in their divisions.

Roman Sinitsyn, a volunteer who provides Ukrainian military Starlink systems, said the problem may have arisen because of SpaceXʼs attempts to prevent its misuse by the Russian military. He claims that failures were observed in recently liberated areas, the capture of which was not officially reported by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.