President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has claimed that limits placed on Starshield, the military-grade service run by Starlink, have made it easier for Russia to carry out a string of lethal attacks across Ukraine.
In a post on X, Zelenskyy said Russia was aiming Shahed drones at energy substations, and that many of those strikes were getting through because Starshield terminals along the front line and in occupied areas still faced limits on their operating speed. He repeated accusations that Starlink’s sister company was throttling internet speeds and hampering military operations.
Starlink disputes Kyiv’s claims over Starshield throttling
Zelenskyy said on Saturday that the restrictions had been in place for five days. He said Starlink had blamed technical problems, but Ukraine “not believe that is the case,” he added.
Also read: Russian strikes further damage Ukraine's power network
This is the second such outage in recent weeks. Starlink, which is owned by SpaceX, the company of US billionaire Elon Musk, has denied restricting internet speeds. Last month, Musk said the US government controls Starshield.
Drone strikes hit Odesa, Koriukivka and Russian regions
Two people were killed on Saturday in a Russian drone attack on what Ukrainian officials described as “critical infrastructure” in the northern Koriukivka region. Overnight on Sunday, an energy facility in Odesa was struck, leaving 41,000 households without electricity, according to DTEK, Ukraine’s energy provider, which announced the outage in a Telegram statement.
Ukraine’s army said it shot down 106 of 132 Russian drones launched overnight. Russia’s Defence Ministry said on Sunday that its forces had targeted Ukrainian military airfields, munitions depots and other military facilities.
On the Russian side, authorities said an electrical engineer was killed and four others were injured in the Taganrog region after Ukrainian drones attacked the area on Sunday. Local officials said six people were hurt in a drone attack in Nizhnekamsk, while the wider Trans-Kama region of Tatarstan reported heavy Ukrainian attacks on industrial facilities and a residential building earlier that day.
US ceasefire push and Shenzhen summit sideline Ukraine
US negotiators wrapped up visits to both countries in recent days in an effort to secure a ceasefire, despite tension between Washington and Kyiv over Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. Zelenskyy said Washington had floated the idea of Ukraine pulling its remaining forces out of the eastern Donbas region in return for NATO membership.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is due to meet President Donald Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping in the Chinese city of Shenzhen this week, but Ukraine is not on the agenda. Analysts have compared the meeting to the 1945 Yalta conference, which saw the US, UK and former Soviet Union divide Germany and establish the United Nations.
In a statement on Sunday, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha dismissed Russia’s long-standing proposal to revise Europe’s security architecture. “Putin is throwing around ideas about reshaping the European security order. In his dreams, he sees himself in Yalta in 1945. The problem is that to put forward ideas of this magnitude, you first need to win a world war,” he said.
