US entrepreneur Elon Musk had powered down his Starlink satellite network over Crimea

The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service, Kyrylo Budanov said.

Earlier in the week, a Spanish newspaper reported that although Kiev already had found alternatives to the internet provided by Starlink satellites, it could not break up with Musk’s company as it would result in the Ukrainian defense’s crumbling.

“It is true that he did turn off his products and services over Crimea before. But there’s another side to that truth. Everybody’s been aware of that … This specific case everybody’s referring to, there was a shutdown of the coverage over Crimea, but it wasn’t at that specific moment. That shutdown was for a month,” Budanov told an American military magazine, adding that “throughout the whole first period” of the conflict there was no satellite coverage at all.