Somebody throttled the communications of a country at war, and nobody will say who. SpaceX denied responsibility. Trump said he hadn't ordered it and that Elon Musk shouldn't be blamed. Then Trump said he would ask Musk to lift the restrictions. Ukraine's defense minister thanked "dialogue" between Kyiv and Washington. The connections are restored, and we are told to be relieved.
We shouldn't be. The restoration is the scandal. A sovereign democracy fighting for its survival got its drones back because a president made a favor request to a billionaire. That is not an alliance or a rules-based order. It is feudalism with a satellite constellation.
Consider what we still don't know. We don't know who made the change, why, or whether it will happen again. We know drones traveling above 250 mph lost connectivity for more than a week, and Zelenskyy had to call it a national-security issue in public to be heard. No treaty, statute or contract with public accountability governed any of this. It was decided in the space between a company's terms of service and one man's mood.
This isn't new. In 2022, during a Ukrainian operation near Crimea, Musk's role in limiting coverage drew wide reporting and a dispute over what he did and didn't do. His own account was that he declined to enable service, not that he switched it off. Either way, the lesson was plain: the infrastructure of Ukraine's defense includes a private actor who can say no. Four years on, the lesson has apparently been absorbed by everyone except the people who could have acted on it.
And the people who could have acted include my own side. Washington's liberal establishment spent years praising Starlink's heroics in Ukraine while quietly accepting that a single contractor with erratic politics and large financial interests in Washington's goodwill had become load-bearing for a NATO-adjacent war. Democrats in office were comfortable with this arrangement as long as Musk seemed to be on the right team. That is not a defense policy. It is hoping the oligarch stays friendly.
The right-wing version of this story says the market delivered, a private firm did what governments couldn't, and everyone should say thank you. But a market that delivers until the owner has a different view is not a public good. We don't let a private company decide whether the fire department answers calls from a particular neighborhood. Military communications for an ally under invasion should not depend on a CEO's relationship with the president.
The one hopeful detail in this story is easy to miss. Ukraine signed a letter of intent with Nokia and ICEYE and announced a partnership with Norway on air defense and communications. That is the correct instinct: build redundancy, diversify suppliers, and tie capability to governments and firms that answer to someone. Europe should treat it as an emergency program, not a procurement footnote. Sovereign satellite communications, publicly financed and democratically governed, should have been funded the day the first Starlink terminal reached Kharkiv. Instead we got conferences and delays.
The broader point matters beyond Ukraine. Every time a private company becomes indispensable to the state, we are told it's efficiency. Then the company's owner discovers he has leverage, and the state discovers it has a dependency. Governments that outsource their core functions end up asking permission to use them.
Ukraine has its connection back. Fine. But the next outage won't be announced on a schedule, and the next call to Washington might not work. The only real fix is to make sure no call is necessary.
