Brussels has gone public against Elon Musk’s company. The European Commission on Wednesday called on SpaceX to “urgently” restore full Starlink service in Ukraine, escalating a row over reports that the satellite network was deliberately slowed in the middle of a war — and signaling that Europe wants its own answer to the problem.
“Recent reports that Starlink has slowed its services in Ukraine are deeply concerning and do not reflect how the company has provided these services in the past,” the Commission’s defense and space spokesperson, Thomas Regnier, told the midday briefing in Brussels. “SpaceX must urgently fully restore services for Ukraine.”
Regnier said Ukraine needs the satellite links for three things at once: keeping soldiers connected on the front line, protecting civilians, and flying the drones that have become central to how Kyiv fights this war. Until this week, the Commission had answered questions about the throttling cautiously, saying only that it had heard the reports and was looking into them. The direct demand on Wednesday marks a sharp shift in tone.
The restrictions surfaced around October 14, when Ukrainian military units reported that terminals mounted on drones lost their connection once they exceeded roughly 160 kilometers per hour (99 miles per hour). For a country that now relies on fast, radio-silent drones — including interceptor drones built to chase down Russia’s jet-powered Shahed-type strike drones — a 160 km/h ceiling is not a minor inconvenience. It can make entire classes of drones virtually unusable. Ukraine has since said its military counterpart to Starlink, Starshield, saw its own speed cap lifted, but Kyiv is pushing for the limit to be raised to at least 450 km/h, according to Ukrainian media reports.
The dispute has become a blame game at the top. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Musk personally ordered the slowdown, following what it described as his anger over Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. Musk has rejected that account, insisting on X that any limits on Starshield — the military-grade service — are decided by the U.S. military, with the president having the final say. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the United States ordered no such restrictions. President Donald Trump, asked who was responsible, said he would “like to find out.”
Brussels is not just complaining — it is planning an exit from the dependency. Regnier confirmed the Commission wants Ukraine connected to IRIS², the European Union’s planned secure satellite constellation of more than 300 satellites, a multibillion-euro project designed precisely to give Europe independent, secure communications for military and civilian use. The war, Regnier acknowledged, has shown “to what extent Europe’s security depends on space” — and, by extension, on one American billionaire’s hardware.
That dependency runs deep. Germany currently pays for the contract that keeps Starlink’s military service running in Ukraine, a deal that runs until April 2027. If SpaceX were to degrade or withdraw the service again, Europe has no comparable alternative in orbit yet — IRIS² is still being built.
Why this matters. For the first time, a major Western government bloc is publicly telling a private company to restore wartime communications — treating a billionaire’s business decision as a matter of European security. The episode has exposed how a single company’s satellite network became load-bearing infrastructure for an entire war, from the interceptor drones that chase Russian missiles to the ordinary radios of front-line units. Brussels’ answer — build IRIS² and plug Ukraine into it — is the clearest sign yet that Europe sees strategic autonomy in orbit as urgent, not theoretical. Whether SpaceX complies will be answered in weeks; whether Europe’s alternative arrives before the next crisis is a question for years.
