Elon Musk's Starlink and Starshield, and what they mean to Ukraine

Over the past week, Ukraine has received a stark reminder of its growing dependence on uninterrupted access to Elon Musk's Starlink and Starshield networks in its drone-heavy war against Russia, now in its fifth year.Ukraine has a fraction of Russia's resources, but its aggressive development of drone warfare on defensive and offensive fronts has helped it endure an onslaught from its much bigger adversary, which invaded Ukraine in early 2022. That was true until last week, when Ukraine reported a throttling of the Starshield network that was causing its drones to stop midflight and fall out of the sky.The two SpaceX networks operate on a constellation of thousands of low-Earth satellites — Starlink is the commercial version, while Starshield is a military product licensed to the U.S. government and its partners, among them Ukraine.Kyiv's reliance on drones has made Starlink and Starshield nearly indispensable to its arsenal. When Ukraine experienced a disruption to those networks, it lost the shield of interceptors and drones that offered some protection against Russian drone and missile strikes.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy believes Musk throttled Starshield at the requ...