Regarding #Starlink, I think there’s some contradictory messages circulating right now.

A week ago the narrative was that Musk switched off Starlink over Black Sea in order to thwart Ukraine’s naval drones attacks. Now the message seems to be that he didn’t actually switch anything off, he just refused to activate it when it was not active in that area before.

We don’t know if he could activate it by a matter of a simple decision, or it would involve reconfiguration of the satellite constellation or whatever other significant technical changes. Two-way satellite communication systems don’t have 100% coverage on the Earth and they are limited both by commercial interests (few prospective Starlink users in the middle of Black Sea) and technical limitations (number of satellites, physical constraints of orbits etc).

There’s one more point from Musk’s response worth highlighting: Starlink is a civilian system intended to provide commercial broadband Internet access, not real-time communications to weapon systems. If it starts to be used for the latter, it has consequences for both Starlink and for other users of Starlink, such as jamming, sabotage, sanctions, threats etc.

Most importantly, US army has completely separate real-time video systems for use by their UAVs and yet nobody expects US army giving #Ukraine full access to them. In the same way we shouldn’t be really surprised Ukraine army is piggybacking on a civilian communications systems like Starlink for their weapons, but also by the fact that its operator is reluctant to extend its zone of operations to suit strictly military needs.