AINEWS
Ukraine asked the US president this week to help persuade Elon Musk to unlock Starlink for strikes on Russian territory as Patriot interceptors run low.
In the Oval Office this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked President Donald Trump to help him secure Elon Musk's permission to extend Starlink satellite coverage into Russia so Ukraine can guide drone strikes on Russian soil, according to The Atlantic's original reporting. Trump did not commit, and the details come from people familiar with the meeting who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The ask is unusual in shape. It is one head of state asking another to lobby a private American CEO on his behalf, because the only piece of infrastructure that can connect Ukrainian drones to their operators across hundreds of miles of contested airspace is a satellite internet network Musk personally owns and currently restricts from operating inside Russia. The Associated Press confirmed the same Oval Office request, and Zelensky raised the same appeal with lawmakers on Capitol Hill during his Washington visit, according to US News.
Starlink is a low-Earth-orbit satellite internet constellation operated by Musk's SpaceX. On the Ukrainian battlefield, the network has become the layer that lets a drone pilot in a bunker in Kherson see what a first-person-view drone sees in real time, even when conventional radio links are jammed. Musk currently allows Starlink to operate within Ukrainian borders, including in Russian-occupied territory, but bars its use inside Russia itself, a line that has held since early in the war. Zelensky has been pressing US officials to lift that restriction for several weeks, The Atlantic reported.
The pressure behind the ask is closer to the front line. Patriot surface-to-air missile interceptors, the US-supplied system Kyiv has leaned on to shoot down Russian ballistic and cruise missiles, are running low, and replacements are not arriving fast enough. Trump has reportedly stepped back from a recent pledge to grant Ukraine a license to produce Patriot systems domestically, The Atlantic reported. That leaves Kyiv searching for a different way to deliver fires deep into Russian territory: cheap, long-range drones that can reach air-defense sites, command nodes, and energy infrastructure, but only if the pilots can stay connected to them. The first-person-view drones and improvised long-range strike drones that have come to define Ukraine's deep-strike campaign depend on a stable data link between the aircraft and its operator, which is what Starlink provides when conventional radio is jammed or out of range.
The State Department confirmed a separate Trump-administration call with Zelensky on Thursday, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Mike Waltz telling the Ukrainian president that the United States would continue to support Ukraine's defense and that a deal to end the war "must be guided by the will of the Ukrainian people," according to a statement published by the State Department. The statement did not address Starlink.
A second layer of risk sits in orbit. The Associated Press reported in December that two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing an anti-satellite weapon designed to attack Starlink by releasing clouds of shrapnel in orbit. AP could not independently verify the intelligence, and the report cites anonymous officials. If those concerns are accurate, expanding Starlink's role in strikes inside Russia gives Moscow a clearer reason to test the system.
The constraint Zelensky is now hitting is the comms switch. Public air-defense supply has narrowed, and the next bottleneck is not a budget line or a treaty. It is a private company policy set by one person, in a country the request is not aimed at, on infrastructure that is now load-bearing for one side of the war. If Musk agrees, Ukraine gains a targeting layer that does not depend on Washington's resupply tempo. If he does not, Kyiv has to find another way to reach targets its pilots can already see.
The next signal to watch is whether Trump publicly raises Starlink with Musk, and whether SpaceX changes the geographic restrictions in its service terms.