Summary
The U.S. has reportedly warned Ukraine that access to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet could be cut off if Kyiv does not agree to a deal granting the U.S. access to its critical minerals.
This was raised in talks after Ukrainian President Zelenskiy rejected a proposal involving a 50% share of Ukraine’s minerals, including lithium and uranium.
Starlink is crucial for Ukraine’s military operations, and losing it would be a significant blow.
Negotiations are ongoing, but tensions between Zelenskiy and Trump are escalating over Ukraine’s war strategy and mineral wealth.
This would be a major setback. And thus, describes the intent of the Trump administration - to extort a peace on their terms, as if they were the enemy - quite vividly.
For sea drones, there could be a work-around (some other satcom system) but for ordinary units on ground, a work around must be cheap - for them, engineers would be drilling posts into ground and running temporary fiber to temporary base stations like there’s no tomorrow. One hop of fiber can be quite long, 80 km is no problem with really cheap COTS hardware (professional hardware can probably talk over hundreds of kilometers). It’s making changes that is problematic.
Of course, units would also fall back to using civilian cell phone networks, some with directional antennas (e.g. you know that 10 km to your rear is an intact base station at (X,Y), you point a 20 decibel parabolic dish towards that direction and get online without the enemy having a good idea about your whereabouts. A big hassle, but not an insurmountable one.
Long range strike drones 99% likely aren’t using Starlink. They fly by inertial navigation and machine vision, and pick up clues from Russian mobile networks.
This is why the world needs to decouple themselves from American technology. We need more options.