Arrival in a Nation on Fumes
I stepped off the train at Kyiv Central Station in late April 2022 into a city running on fumes. Fuel was scarce; what little existed was rationed for ambulances, military convoys, and a narrow category of essential vehicles. Some gas stations had shuttered altogether, their pumps wrapped in tape, their forecourts abandoned. In that brittle atmosphere, mobility was a currency. My friend Hardy, a former SOCOM engineer, had found a workaround: a young Ukrainian with a Tesla. I’ve never been a devotee of electric cars, but in those days, utility trumped taste. The quiet hum of that battery-powered sedan was, improbably, a lifeline. It was also my first experience of Elon Musk’s technology altering my odds of survival. I’d once owned Tesla stock back in 2008. That week in Kyiv, my regard for him deepened.
Starlink at the Zero Line
Weeks later, I was in Velyka Novosilka, a contested village in the Donbas, embedded with the Normand Brigade—the first unit I joined as a volunteer. Our safe house sat just 400 meters from the zero line. Inside, I discovered something I hadn’t expected: a live internet connection—Starlink. In war, a link to the outside world is not a luxury but an anchor. Here, it wasn’t just for morale.
Starlink was the arterial network for military communications, enabling encrypted channels on Signal and Telegram, resilient against interception, and more efficient than radio chatter.
ISR drone operators depended on it to push imagery and coordinates across multiple units in seconds. In Iraq, we’d had Blue Force Tracker; in this ad-hoc formation, outside the formal ЗСУ structure, such a tool had been unthinkable—until it materialized on a plastic dish under the Ukrainian sky.
Musk the Good Billionaire
In those early months, Musk gave Starlink to Ukraine free of charge. Two days into the invasion, Digital Minister Mykhailo Fedorov had tweeted him a plea; within four days, the first terminals were in-country. The effect was transformative. In 2008, during Russia’s brief invasion of Georgia, 90 percent of that nation’s communications infrastructure had been disabled within days. Ukraine’s resilience in 2022 owed much to those orbiting satellites. When Musk acquired Twitter (now X), it seemed he was aligning himself with Kyiv in both the kinetic and informational dimensions of the war.
The First Signs of Friction
By October, the tenor shifted. Musk threatened to pull Starlink’s military access, citing unsustainable costs. The business logic was plain: Starlink had become a defense asset, and defense contractors are paid for their wares. He eventually reversed himself, and the service migrated onto a formal defense contract. Yet by 2023, his public tone had cooled, reflecting a broader right-populist skepticism of Ukraine aid as America’s presidential race gathered momentum.
Memes and Messaging
That year, Musk tweeted a meme of President Volodymyr Zelensky with the caption: “When it’s been five minutes and you haven’t asked for a billion dollars in aid.” It ricocheted through pro-Russian channels and drew condemnation from allies, including Britain’s defense secretary. I was on my second rotation in Ukraine. Having seen Starlink keep men alive, I watched Musk’s rhetoric grow corrosive and felt the first cracks in my admiration.
Merging with the Populist Right
By mid-2024, Musk’s positions increasingly tracked with Republican voices hostile to foreign aid, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, and meshed with Donald Trump’s campaign vow to cut Ukraine off. His formal endorsement of Trump that July, in the aftermath of the Pennsylvania rally shooting, felt like a hinge moment. For me—a veteran with friends in the ground war—it was a one-issue election. Continued U.S. aid was a matter of life and death.
From Hero to Liability
By year’s end, Musk’s endorsements reached Europe’s AfD, a far-right party with EU-skeptical, pro-Moscow leanings. The arc was complete: from tech billionaire aiding a besieged democracy to figure openly aligned with Kremlin-friendly movements. Trump has since tilted back toward NATO orthodoxy, restoring aid, but his alliance with Musk fractured in public acrimony.
Allegations of Battlefield Interference
After 2023, reports circulated of Musk resisting Starlink’s use for Ukrainian drone strikes on Crimea. In July 2025, investigative accounts alleged he had ordered Starlink coverage cut during Ukraine’s summer 2023 counteroffensive, triggering communications blackouts in active combat zones—turning an already costly push into an impossible one.
No Near-Peer Alternative
Between 2022 and mid-2025, there was no near-peer competitor to match Starlink’s blend of speed, coverage, portability, bandwidth, and resilience. For Ukraine’s front-line units, the choice was binary: Starlink or nothing. OneWeb, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and other constellations either lacked the coverage, the hardware, or the readiness for battlefield deployment. In the flat expanses of eastern Ukraine, Starlink’s reliability was unmatched. That monopoly gave Musk extraordinary leverage—not only over Ukraine’s war effort but over U.S. and NATO policy. In an era when a single tech executive can tilt the balance of a war, the question is no longer just about one man’s motives. It is about whether any private citizen should wield that much power in a conflict that could define the century.