Reuters: Elon Musk ordered to disable Starlink in the Kherson region during the onset of the Armed Forces of the Armed Forces in the fall of 2022

According to the agency, he was afraid of a nuclear response from Russia

In September 2022, the American businessman, the founder of SpaceX, ordered his team to turn off the Starlink connection in the Kherson region, where the Ukrainian army tried to hold an offensive. Reuters writes about this with reference to three informed sources.

According to the publication, in total, about a hundred Starlink terminals were turned off. In addition to the Kherson region, the network has ceased to be available in several other regions occupied by Russia, for example, in the Donetsk region.

“The soldiers panicked, the drones watched the Russian troops stopped working, and the long -range artillery units, who were assigned to Starlink for aiming, experienced difficulties with getting into the goal,” the sources told Reuters.

This was the first known case when Musk turned off the Starlink cover over the battlefield during an armed conflict, the agency notes. According to the interlocutors, this decision “shocked” some employees of the company and actually changed the front line, allowing the mask to “take the outcome of the war in their own hands”.

According to Reuters sources, the entrepreneur was afraid that the Ukrainian offensive could lead to a nuclear response from Russia. This opinion was shared by some American officials.

The SpaceX representative in an interview with Reuters called such information “inaccurate” and emphasized that “Starlink is completely committed to the provision of services to Ukraine.”