TechPulse USA

By TechPulse USA | 24 October 2026 On Saturday morning, Ukraine finally got the number it had been waiting for. Not a promise, not an assurance relayed through a third party, and not another claim that the problem was already fixed. A number, read off a monitoring system, by the country's defence minister, to reporters: over 400 kilometres per hour, and stable. That is the whole story and, in a way, it is not the story at all. Because the speed is back, and nobody in a position to explain the past eleven days will say who took it away in the first place. Ukraine's defence minister, Evhenii Khmara, told reporters on Saturday 24 October that Starlink and Starshield — the civilian satellite system and its military version, both operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX — were operating again at speeds over 400 kph after more than a week of restrictions. "The Ministry of Defence's monitoring systems are recording a return to normal speed for Starlink/Starshield. We are record...

Donald Trump declared the problem solved. Kyiv, checking the front line on Friday morning, says it isn't. A day after the US president told reporters that Elon Musk had restored Ukraine's Starshield access — "the bottom line, he put it back" — Ukrainian officials spent the morning documenting the opposite: connectivity still dropping at 161 kilometres per hour, no confirmation of any change, and interceptor drones still going dark at the worst possible moments. Someone, somewhere, is wrong about what happened between Thursday's announcement and Friday's battlefield. And the gap between those two stories is now wider than any speed limit SpaceX ever imposed. Photo: A SpaceX Starlink user terminal (illustrative). Ukraine's military says speed restrictions on Starlink/Starshield connections remain in place as of Friday morning. Credit: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Update, Oct. 23 (evening): the 200 km/h false dawn — and Trump's Fr...

For ten days, nobody would admit who throttled the internet connection Ukraine's drones fly on. Elon Musk said the military and the president decide. The president said he didn't know. The Pentagon said it changed nothing. Then, on Wednesday, Donald Trump picked up the phone, called Musk — and, mostly, it came back. That's the short version of the strangest episode of the war's tech war. The longer version involves a speed limit lower than a camper van on a Texas highway, a feud over Russian diesel, and a week of denials so botched that nine United States senators are now demanding the Pentagon's watchdog name the person who ordered it. Photo: a stack of 60 Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9 before entering orbit. Starshield, the military-grade network built on Starlink technology, is what Ukraine's forces lost reliable access to this month. Photo: Official SpaceX Photos, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Update, Oct. 23: Trump says it's "back...