Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, said on Sunday 25 October that U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should testify before the Senate about the Starlink satellite internet limits that disrupted Ukrainian military operations, according to NBC News. He spoke on the network’s “Meet the Press” a day after Elon Musk said on X that his company SpaceX had throttled the service in Ukraine.
What Musk says triggered the cut
Musk wrote on X on 24 October that Ukraine’s military had violated Starlink’s terms of service by using it for offensive drone strikes, and that “that loophole was closed last week,” according to the Associated Press in an account carried by Hürriyet Daily News. In the AP account he described Starlink as a civilian commercial service and wrote that using it for offensive drone strikes to kill people had never been allowed and should not be. In overnight posts he added that the company “simply enforced our terms of service when they were bypassed,” NBC News reported.
What that enforcement did technically is the one thing neither account pins down. Neither Musk nor Kyiv has attached a percentage, a bandwidth cap or an Mbps figure to what was slowed, or said how many terminals were affected; the only indication of the mechanism is that both sides discuss the episode in terms of speed rather than cut-off.
What the slowdown did in Ukraine
The Associated Press reported that the restrictions disrupted front-line operations for more than a week — the only quantified measure of the episode in either report. Ukraine said the disruptions made it harder to intercept incoming Russian attacks, according to NBC News.
Because Starlink reaches Ukraine as a commercial subscription rather than a government-owned system, its availability there rests on terms the operator can revise; neither report says whether civilian subscribers in Ukraine or the wider region saw any change to service levels or pricing during the week in question.
Three days of contradictory statements
On Thursday 22 October, President Donald Trump said Musk had restored Starlink in Ukraine, NBC News reported. A day later, Ukraine denied the satellite system was working properly. Then on Saturday 24 October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said access to both Starlink and Starshield had been returned to pre-restriction speeds, posting on X that “the speeds are now where they need to be.” Schiff spoke the following morning.
Conflicting accounts of who ordered it
Zelensky told “Meet the Press” the previous week that the Ukrainian government believed the decision came from the U.S. government, saying it was a message from the American government to limit the speed and that SpaceX then did it technically, NBC News reported.
Washington has rejected that. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that reporting suggesting the U.S. government was denying Ukraine something it needed to defend itself was “not true” and “not accurate,” NBC News reported, and the Trump administration has denied requesting changes to Starlink’s operation in Ukraine. Musk, for his part, said the U.S. government controlled whatever changes happened with Starshield — although Musk and Trump have given different accounts of who runs Starshield, and the accounts have not matched for days.
Schiff put it bluntly on the programme: “Somebody is lying here.” He said the president and Musk had each said different things at different times, pointed to Musk’s posts as evidence that “something changed within the last week,” and said he wanted to know what changed, why, and what effect it had on Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
Why it matters
Starlink is a commercial service run by a private company, and Kyiv has relied on it for years to counter Moscow’s attacks, according to the Associated Press. Schiff framed that dependence as a public-policy problem, telling NBC News that “the world’s richest person shouldn’t be controlling our national security interests” and calling the situation, if true, “a spectacular threat to our national security.”
The competing explanations point to two different chains of authority. By Musk’s account the change was a company enforcing its own contract; by Zelensky’s it was a government instruction executed by that company. Schiff’s remarks to NBC News treat both as beyond congressional sight so far: he said he wanted the department compelled to explain what happened, and that Hegseth and “anyone who has knowledge of what happened” should be brought in.
What happens next is unclear
Schiff’s call is conditional. He tied the prospect of testimony to Democrats retaking the Senate and said Republicans had so far been unwilling to ask those questions, according to NBC News. No hearing, date or witness list has been announced in either report.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Starshield, and how does it differ from consumer Starlink?
Starshield is the military-grade version of Starlink, and the Associated Press describes it as the backbone of Ukraine’s drone operations and communications. NBC News notes that Musk has previously said limits on the “speed or usage” of Starshield are decided by the U.S. military and ultimately the president.
Did Donald Trump ask Elon Musk to lift the Starlink restrictions?
NBC News reported that The Wall Street Journal said last week that President Donald Trump called Musk and asked him to lift his company’s satellite service restrictions.
Are peace talks on the war planned?
The Associated Press reported that the restoration of service follows a new U.S. diplomatic push to end the war, and that Russia agreed last week to resume three-way negotiations with Washington and Kyiv next month. No date for those talks was given in the report.
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