President Volodymyr Zelensky said on 4 October that Ukraine is building its own satellite communications system, which it has been testing with a European partner since August. Elon Musk cut Ukraine's Starlink coverage during a 2022 offensive, according to Reuters, and US negotiators threatened to switch the service off in 2025. Germany and the European Union are building their own constellations, and Ontario has cancelled its Starlink contract. Russia is building a rival network with Chinese help, and Dmitry Medvedev has threatened a "full-scale space war" if the United States blocks it.

Zelensky told reporters the work was moving forward. "There are developments. We are working on a similar Starlink," he said. Ukraine's soldiers fly drones, direct artillery and talk to their commanders through Starlink, the satellite internet service run by Musk's company SpaceX. Ukrainian units used about 42,000 Starlink terminals in March 2025, about half of them paid for by Poland at a cost of about $50 million a year.

Zelensky first described the project on 23 August, when he said Ukraine was "implementing a similar project with a European country". "We have begun testing it," he said. He declined to name the partner country and said Ukraine would keep using Starlink while it developed its own system.

Ukrainian naval drones lost their connection as they approached the Russian Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol in September 2022, after Musk refused to provide Starlink coverage near the Crimean coast, according to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. "If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war," Musk wrote on X in September 2023. He wrote that the coverage had never been switched on: "The Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything." Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, said Musk had "allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, children are being killed."

Musk ordered a SpaceX engineer to shut off Starlink coverage near Beryslav in the Kherson region during Ukraine's autumn 2022 counteroffensive, Reuters reported in July 2025, citing three people familiar with the matter. The outage disabled drones and cut artillery communications, and a Ukrainian military source told Reuters it contributed to a failed attempt to encircle Russian troops. Musk feared that a Ukrainian breakthrough could provoke a Russian nuclear response, according to Reuters' sources. SpaceX did not confirm the account.

The Wall Street Journal reported in October 2024 that Musk had been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin since late 2022 and that Putin had asked him not to activate Starlink over Taiwan as a favour to Xi Jinping. "It's all untrue, absolutely false information published in the newspaper," Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, said. He said the two men had spoken once, before 2022.

Keith Kellogg, Trump's envoy for Ukraine, raised the possibility of cutting Ukraine's Starlink access in a meeting with Zelensky on 20 February 2025, after Zelensky rejected a US demand for 50 per cent of Ukraine's critical minerals, Reuters reported. Ukraine was told it "faced imminent shutoff of the service if it did not reach a deal", according to a source briefed on the talks.

Musk wrote on 9 March 2025 that Ukraine's "entire front line would collapse if I turned it off". When Radosław Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister, said Poland would look for other suppliers if SpaceX proved unreliable, Musk told him: "Be quiet, small man. You pay a tiny fraction of the cost." Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said: "No one has made any threats about cutting Ukraine off from Starlink." Musk wrote that Starlink "will never turn off its terminals".

SpaceX cut off unregistered terminals in Ukraine on 4 and 5 February 2026, after Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's defence minister, asked Musk to act against Russian forces using smuggled Starlink terminals. Russian military bloggers reported that about 90 per cent of Russian units in Ukraine lost internet access.

SpaceX still restricts Starlink's use for deep strikes into Russia. Zelensky said in August 2026 that Ukraine had asked Musk and the US government to allow Starlink to be used over Russian territory and that Musk regarded the request as escalation.

Jair Bolsonaro, then Brazil's president, received Musk in São Paulo state on 20 May 2022, five months before the election in which he sought a second term. Musk announced Starlink service for 19,000 rural schools and monitoring of the Amazon. Bolsonaro called Musk's bid to buy Twitter a "breath of hope". Deforestation in the Amazon had reached its highest rate in more than a decade under Bolsonaro.

Starlink refused in August 2024 to block X in Brazil after Alexandre de Moraes, a Supreme Court justice, ordered the platform suspended. X had refused to comply with orders against accounts of Bolsonaro supporters who disputed the 2022 election result and to appoint a legal representative in Brazil. Moraes froze Starlink's Brazilian assets to cover X's fines of more than $3 million. Starlink, which had more than 250,000 customers in Brazil, complied on 4 September. "Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil," the company said.

Giorgia Meloni's government in Italy negotiated a €1.5 billion, five-year contract with SpaceX for encrypted government and military communications. The talks stalled in March 2025 after Musk's clash with Sikorski. "It seems to me that everything has come to a standstill," Guido Crosetto, Italy's defence minister, said. Crosetto called Musk a "visionary genius".

The US State Department pressed countries facing Trump's tariffs to approve Starlink in 2025, The Washington Post reported from internal cables. India, Vietnam, Lesotho, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo fast-tracked or partly approved Starlink licences. A State Department memo recorded that Lesotho saw its approval as a show of goodwill towards American companies.

Germany has paid for Ukraine's use of Eutelsat's OneWeb satellite internet since 2024. Eutelsat, whose OneWeb network had fewer than 700 satellites, negotiated with European institutions and business partners in March 2025 to expand the service in Ukraine, the Financial Times reported. Eva Berneke, Eutelsat's chief executive, said in April 2025 that the company aimed to supply between 5,000 and 10,000 terminals in Ukraine "relatively fast".

Germany's Ministry of Defence confirmed in April 2025 that the Bundeswehr plans its own constellation of hundreds of satellites, targeted for around 2029, to reduce its reliance on Starlink.

Ontario's government cancelled a CA$100 million contract with Starlink in August 2025 in retaliation for US tariffs on Canadian goods and said it would look for a Canadian provider. "I can confirm that the Premier has fulfilled his word," Stephen Lecce, the province's energy minister, said.

The European Commission chose Aerospacelab, a Belgian company, on 16 September 2026 to build 264 of the 330 low-orbit satellites in IRIS², the European Union's own constellation. The network will cost €15.6 billion and is due to start commercial service in mid-2032. Starlink had about 10,900 satellites in orbit in August 2026.

Russia's rival network

Zelensky said in August that Russia was building "a Starlink equivalent together with the Chinese" and expected to have it ready by December 2026. The Financial Times reported on 3 October that he had asked Trump several times to sanction the Russian and Chinese companies building it, including at their meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York in September. The network, Rassvet, is being developed by the Russian company Bureau 1440. "We know that China is working on satellites, working on the ability to help Russia create a Starlink analog," Zelensky told the newspaper. He said Rassvet could be working by the end of 2026 or early in 2027.

Bureau 1440 had launched 16 satellites by March and plans about 900, TechRepublic reported. "Satellites are already being launched. In the coming weeks, we will begin testing, and as promised, it will start operating commercially in 2027," Alexei Shelobkov, the company's chief executive, said.

Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, answered Zelensky's sanctions request on 4 October by threatening American satellites. Blocking Rassvet would "lead to a full-scale space war", he said. "Otherwise, their low-orbit Starlink satellites will then come dropping like decorations off a dried-out Christmas tree," he said. "Space is a very cramped place so it's a must to be mutually polite."

Ukraine's own satellites

Ukraine's Ministry of Defence set up a Space Policy Directorate in March 2025 to coordinate the country's space work with companies, scientists and foreign partners. Stetman, a Ukrainian company, is building a low Earth orbit constellation called UASAT with GomSpace, a Danish satellite maker. Stetman has given planned sizes of 245, 300 and 360 satellites at an altitude of about 550 kilometres, about 150 of them for Ukraine, at a cost of more than €1 billion. Its founder, Dmytro Stetsenko, has died, and Kateryna Diachenko has replaced him as chief executive.

Ukraine's first test satellite, UASAT-NANO, is due to go up in October 2026, with full deployment from 2027. Russia's Rassvet is due to start commercial service in 2027, and Europe's IRIS² in 2032. UASAT-NANO will launch on a SpaceX rocket. "SpaceX is the best option, as they are the cheapest and the most reliable," Stetsenko said.