After initial sympathy, the billionaire vehemently turned against the Ukrainian cause following several public disputes with President Volodymyr Zelensky and other Ukrainian leaders. One of these disputes stemmed from Musk's refusal in 2022 to allow the Ukrainian army to use Starlink in an attack on Crimea, fearing excessive involvement in the war, as any action against this Russian-occupied peninsula, now regularly bombarded, was considered an escalation. During his few months in the Donald Trump administration, Musk routinely discredited Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause, leading Kyiv to fear that the billionaire would cut off its army from Starlink. Four years after helping Ukraine with Starlink at the war's outset, the South African-born tycoon has once again become a Kyiv ally and has featured in the best news from the front that Ukraine has received in many months. After two years of positional warfare where Russia used its overwhelming numerical superiority to wear down the enemy and gradually gain territory at a high cost, the battlefield trend has reversed. According to figures from the Ukrainian war analysis platform DeepState, Russia captured 126 square kilometers of territory in February, half of what it did in January and less than 30% of December's total. The key factor in this shift is cited as the blocking of Starlink terminals that Russia was illegally using for its communications and drone attacks. In mid-February, Elon Musk's SpaceX and the Ukrainian government took urgent action to prevent Russia from continuing to use Starlink terminals registered in Ukraine for front-line communications and drone strikes. SpaceX's swift reaction came after Ukraine warned Musk that the Russians were using Starlink in their attack and reconnaissance drones to direct them in real-time, even within Ukrainian territory. The blocking of the terminals—to which Russia is prohibited access by U.S. sanctions—would have dramatically reduced the effectiveness of communications between some front-line units.
