{"id":438905,"date":"2026-01-30T13:24:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T13:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/438905\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T13:24:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T13:24:12","slug":"ukraine-working-with-spacex-to-stop-russia-from-using-starlink-to-guide-drones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/438905\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine working with SpaceX to stop Russia from using Starlink to guide drones"},"content":{"rendered":"

KYIV, UKRAINE \u2014 Ukraine is working with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to stop Russia from guiding drones using the firm’s \u200bStarlink internet system, the defense minister said on Thursday, after Kyiv said it had found Starlinks on long-range drones used in Russian attacks.<\/p>\n

A Ukrainian official has posted pictures this week on \u2060social media of the wreckage of long-range Russian drones with Starlink terminals attached, and said Russia may have used Musk’s system to guide \u200cdrones that hit a Ukrainian passenger train on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

“We are grateful to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell \u2060and personally to Elon Musk for the quick response and the start of work on resolving the situation,” \u200cUkraine’s Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov \u200dwrote on the Telegram messaging app.<\/p>\n

“Western technology must continue to help the democratic world \u2060and protect civilians, rather than being used for terrorism and destroying \u2060peaceful cities.”<\/p>\n

SpaceX did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment. Musk turned on Starlink service over Ukraine in 2022 after Kyiv pleaded for help in the first days following Russia’s full-scale invasion.<\/p>\n

Despite Musk’s subsequent clashes with Ukrainian officials over his views on the war, Ukraine’s military still relies on tens of thousands of Starlinks for battlefield communication and for piloting some drone missions.<\/p>\n

They are favored for their stable connection on the battlefield and for their \u200dresistance to enemy signal jamming.<\/p>\n

In a social media post in Feb. 2024, SpaceX stated that it does not sell or ship Starlink to Russia and “does not do business of any kind with the Russian Government or its military”.<\/p>\n

The U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War reported seeing reports that Russia had begun using Starlink-equipped Shahed long-range drones in September 2024.<\/p>\n

‘Hundreds’ of Starlink-equipped drones<\/p>\n

Serhiy Beskrestnov, a newly appointed adviser to Fedorov, drew attention to the issue over the past week by posting pictures on \u200csocial media of the wreckage of long-range Russian drones, including Shaheds, with Starlink terminals.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Beskrestnov said that Shahed drones manually flown by \u200cpilots, possibly through Starlink, had attacked a passenger train in northeastern Ukraine<\/a>. That attack killed five people and was denounced by Kyiv as an act of terrorism.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, Beskrestnov said there had been “hundreds” of cases where Starlink-enabled Russian drones had attacked Ukraine.<\/p>\n

“The complexity of this process lies in the fact that Starlink cannot be suppressed by means of \u2060electronic warfare, and even their \u200bposition in flight cannot be detected by reconnaissance equipment,” he \u2060wrote, adding that the way \u200cto solve the issue was therefore through SpaceX.<\/p>\n

\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KYIV, UKRAINE \u2014 Ukraine is working with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to stop Russia from guiding drones using the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438906,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1302,3811,3812,2091,134,3729,4379,3,111,3813,3814,79,193,99,74,1505,2987,3324,2986],"class_list":["post-438905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-homes","tag-international","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-military","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-science","tag-space","tag-sports","tag-technology","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}