Sometime in the late morning of February 4, somebody at SpaceX headquarters pressed a computer key. A command line was beamed to Starlink’s 9,600 satellites in low Earth orbit. Their onboard processors, circling 550 kilometers above the Earth, instantly obeyed the command and fractionally changed their operational settings. Back down on the frozen ground, in the trenches, bunkers and ruined cities of Russian-occupied Ukraine, hundreds of Starlink terminals lost internet connectivity. As another freezing night set in, the Russian army’s drones and tactical comms went dark.
“We are left without communication!” complained a frontline Russian military officer in a video posted on the Telegram channel “Voenkory Russian Spring.” “Virtually on all fronts it has become difficult to control the troops, fighters write to us and ask us to help with equipment – radio bridges and radios.” Posts on the channel urged volunteers to raise money to buy walkie-talkies. “Belorussian Silovik,” another Russian military blog, warned, “it will now become dramatically clear that units without communications cannot operate effectively. This will be news for some in high offices.”
A man with a keyboard in California has the power of life and death half a world away
According to the “Military Observer” blog, the Russian army “simply has no alternative to Starlink… much, including combat control, was tied to it.” Most of the units had been obtained on the black market by the Russian army. A day after the Starlink shutdown, the Ukrainian General Staff’s daily action report logged just 56 Russian assaults compared to between 80 to 110 for
earlier days. In the weeks after the Starlink shutdown Ukraine recaptured 201 square kilometers of territory from Russia in five days – its biggest gain since 2022.
The reality of modern war is that a man with a keyboard in California has the power of life and death half the world away. The Russia-Ukraine war has become the first major conflict where commercial technology companies – not government defense labs – have provided the backbone of a nation’s wartime capabilities. Silicon Valley is, in a very real sense, a major combatant in Ukraine. Without the independent, portable, high-speed wireless internet connectivity that Starlink provides, Ukraine would have “lost this war long ago,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last year.
Starlink is not the only Silicon Valley behemoth to have made a profound difference to the course of the war. Peter Thiel’s Palantir, the data analytics, AI and data integration platform, provided its Gotham platform free of charge to Ukrainian forces, allowing them to process live drone video, satellite imagery, intercepted communications, radar data and crowdsourced civilian tips (through Ukraine’s eVorog chatbot). This was all turned into battlefield targeting information: identifying Russian logistics and troops. Targeting cycles collapsed from days to minutes. By September 2022, Ukraine had struck more than 400 Russian targets with HIMARS rocket artillery directed, in large part, by Palantir-enabled targeting pipelines.
Big data has also played a key role in Ukraine’s air defenses. In January, Palantir and Ukraine launched the Brave1 Dataroom, a secure AI training environment that uses live battlefield data on Shahed-type drones to develop autonomous interceptor drone algorithms. According to analysis by the website Defense Mirror, integration with Palantir AI has raised hit rates for Saker reconnaissance drones from less than 50 percent for skilled human manual pilots and 10 percent for new recruits to 80 percent.
Protecting Ukraine from sustained Russian cyberattacks has allowed Kyiv to maintain a functioning state and military. Microsoft has invested more than $400 million – the largest single corporate donation to Ukraine – in a raft of antivirus measures. On the morning before the Russian invasion in February 2022, Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center detected the FoxBlade wiper virus targeting Ukrainian infrastructure and immediately alerted both the US and Ukrainian governments.
Since then the company has helped migrate Ukraine’s government from on-premises servers to the Cloud. Amazon Web Services has also played a crucial role in that task, shipping three super-processors from Dublin through Poland to Ukraine on the first day of the invasion. These were used to back up more than ten petabytes of data from 27 ministries and 18 universities. Ukraine’s largest bank, PrivatBank – which serves 20 million customers – migrated 270 applications and four petabytes from 3,500 servers in fewer than 45 days, a process that would normally take months. As Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov (recently promoted to Defense Minister) put it, “Russian missiles can’t destroy the Cloud.”
Google has protected more than 150 Ukrainian websites through Project Shield, donated 50,000 Workspace licenses to the government, deployed rapid air-raid alerts for Android phones and committed $45 million in direct funding. At the same time Clearview AI has provided what Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs called the country’s “secret weapon” – facial recognition software that has enabled a massive data trawl through more than two billion images from Russian social networks. It has identified some 230,000 Russian soldiers deployed in Ukraine.
Without Starlink, Ukraine would have ‘lost this war long ago,’ said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Even smaller Silicon Valley firms have stepped up, with Primer.AI, a San Francisco-based startup, modifying its language-processing tools to capture, translate and analyze unencrypted Russian military voice communications in near-real time.
But even as Silicon Valley has handed critical battlefield advantages to Ukraine, the unprecedented role of private-sector companies in the outcome of the conflict raises questions about corporate power in modern warfare. Central to this controversy is Elon Musk, whose day-to-day decisions have had a direct impact on Ukraine’s fortunes during the war.
Musk entered the fray as a savior. Hours before the Russian invasion, military hackers had deployed wiper malware known as “AcidRain” against Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite network, disabling around 45,000 modems and devastating Ukrainian military communications. Two days into Russia’s full-scale invasion and with the Ukrainian army’s tactical communications paralyzed, Fedorov appealed directly to Musk via Twitter. “While your rockets successfully land from space, Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations.”
Musk replied within hours that “Starlink service is now active in Ukraine. More terminals en route.” The shipment arrived two days later – the first load of more than 200,000 units currently estimated to be operating in Ukraine (80 percent of which are funded by donors, including the EU, US and Polish governments).
The battlefield impact of having access to independent, un-jammable wireless internet was immediate and dramatic. During the Battle of Kyiv, Ukrainian forces used Starlink to maintain command centers and to coordinate the GIS Arta artillery targeting system, cutting targeting time from 20 minutes to fewer than 45 seconds. Starlink was deployed to control naval drone boats in strikes against the Black Sea Fleet and to operate mid-range strike drones such as the Khaki-20 over hundreds of kilometers. During the siege of Mariupol, two helicopter crews risked their lives in a daring low-altitude dash across Russian lines to fly a Starlink terminal to thousands of trapped troops. In a July 2022 letter to Musk, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then the head of Ukraine’s army, praised Starlink’s “exceptional utility.”
But as the war progressed, Musk’s role became more ambiguous – and his enormous influence on the way the war was being fought became more obvious. In September 2022, when Ukrainian drone boats attempted a strike on the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Musk refused to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea, arguing it would make SpaceX “explicitly complicit in a major act of war.” A recent Reuters investigation reported that Musk ordered an engineer to cut Starlink coverage to at least 100 terminals near Beryslav during Ukraine’s counter-offensive in Kherson in October 2022, leaving drones and long-range artillery units unable to function. A Ukrainian military source told Reuters the outage “directly contributed to the failure of the encirclement operation.” (SpaceX called the report “inaccurate” but did not specify which elements it disputed.)
About the same time as the alleged Kherson Starlink blackout, Musk tweeted his own four-point “peace plan” calling for UN-supervised referendums to be held in the annexed regions and suggesting international recognition of Crimea as Russian. That unwelcome intervention prompted Ukraine’s ambassador in Berlin to respond to Musk. “‘Fuck off’ is my very diplomatic reply to you,” he said
The battlefield impact of having access to independent wireless internet was instant and dramatic
The most recent controversy has been the acquisition by Russian units of Starlink terminals smuggled in from other countries (SpaceX does not allow Russian users to set up accounts). As early as the summer of 2024, the Biden administration was pressing SpaceX to deactivate Russian-controlled terminals – but it was only this February, after another Twitter appeal by Fedorov, that Musk acted. All terminals in Ukraine not on a “whitelist” compiled by the Kyiv government have been turned off, and Starlink has installed a “kill-switch” function on any terminal traveling at 70-90 kilometers an hour to prevent their being mounted on board Russian heavy drones.
But if Musk can switch Starlink terminals off, surely he can precisely geolocate them, too? “Could [Musk] triangulate our active Starlink terminals and transmit this information to Ukraine so they could be hit?” asked Maksim Kalashnikov, a worried Russian military blogger, in a recent YouTube show. The technical answer is yes – Starlink needs to know the exact GPS coordinates of each internet terminal on the ground to within ten centimeters because the system has to aim satellite beams very precisely at each terminal to maintain connection.
Whether Starlink would share this data with governments or military forces is a different question. But the fact that a private company has proprietary data on the exact location of every Russian command post in occupied Ukraine is a further illustration of how power has migrated from states to corporations. To win any future war, combatants will have to make sure that the tech generals of Silicon Valley are on their side.
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