Starlink Fiasco Heats Up as Zelensky Begs for Billions From Politically Pooped Europe
Days after the Starlink fiasco, we finally have gotten some clarification as to what really transpired behind the scenes.
Reuters broke the news that the order to shut down the military-grade variant of Starlink did infact come from the White House, according to the usual “anonymous officials” that spoke to the bureau:
The order to limit a satellite system used by Ukraine for battlefield communications and drone operations came from inside the White House,according to two US officials and a Western official briefed on the matter.
The officials said leaders at the Defense Department received a message that the SpaceX Starshield service for the Ukrainian military needed to be slowed.
The Telegraph dropped their own “bombshell” that it was actually Musk who came to Trump with the idea to turn off Starlink:
Elon Musk approached Donald Trump with the idea of slowing down Starlink in Ukraine, The Telegraph can reveal.
The billionaire tech entrepreneur approached the US president with the proposal to introduce speed limits on the system, which hampered Ukraine’s drone defences, according to four sources familiar with the discussions.
One of the sources said Mr Trump “agreed” with Mr Musk’s suggestion, paving the way for the Pentagon to execute the slowdown on Starshield, the military-grade version of the satellite communications system.
A high-ranking European official and two well-placed Ukrainian sources confirmed this version of events.
This version makes the most sense as it accords with both the “coincidental” fact that Musk made strong statements of repudiation against Zelensky with Trump’s well-known suggestibility which we mentioned last time.
Zelensky also added his own bit of clarification, with a side of begging, admitting that the US threatened to pull intelligence:
The jury is still out on whether the throttled speeds have been fully restored yet. Zelensky himself explained they were not yet restored, but are going to be soon according to “signals” he received from the White House:
He clarified further in an official post:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський@ZelenskyyUa
We don’t use Starlink for our responses inside Russia. We use Starlink to intercept jet-powered “shaheds” that attack our civilians and kill families. Starlink wasn’t turned off – its speed was reduced. And when the speed was reduced, we were unable to intercept a certain number…
12:13 PM · Oct 16, 2026 · 22.8K Views
The most interesting developments came from the wheeling-and-dealing behind the scenes, wherein Zelensky’s intermediaries have tried to pressure Trump to make a major concession in exchange for Ukraine “temporarily” halting strikes on Russian refineries:
Zelensky wants Starlink privileges up to 300 kilometers deep into Russia in exchange for cessation of strikes against Russian energy assets for up to three months:
Ukraine would take a breather from striking Russian energy assets. In exchange the U.S. would expand Ukraine’s Starlink satellite coverage up to roughly 300 kilometers into Russia. That would help Ukraine take out the launchers when they fire missiles at men, women and children all over Ukraine. The list of civilian targets this month includes apartment buildings, a school, a supermarket. We’re told Mr. Zelensky said he would agree to the proposal and to refrain from bombing energy sites in Russia for 100 days as part of such a deal.
Such a deal is not advantageous to the US, and essentially represents the strong-arming and blackmailing of Trump by Zelensky. What the US gets is ruined relations with Russia, in exchange for Ukraine “allowing” the US to improve its energy and economic outlook. Everyone knows that Trump does not take kindly to people “allowing” him to do anything—the strongman relies on being the one to dictate terms.
Zelensky contradicts himself: He’s stated in multiple interviews that Russian diesel does not affect global energy markets and has just again repeated yesterday that it is the Iran war responsible for the crisis. Yet in the same breath, he now offers the cessation on attacks against Russian energy enterprises as if that’s supposed to make some kind of difference—the very difference he himself dismissed.
After hearing Zelensky’s initial argument, why would Trump be convinced to take this latest horse trade? It’s a reflection on the hypocritical and unprincipled double dealing political games that Zelensky now relies on as leverage to save himself from the fire.
What’s revealing is how Western media accomplices attempt to play the same sleezy game in a bid to save their chosen globalist puppet. In the WSJ piece above, the authors admit that Ukraine’s strikes on Russian diesel are not responsible for any price shifts, and that Zelensky should therefore have the right to strike these Russian assets:
Mr. Trump wants Ukraine to stop striking Russian energy assets, even though the Ukraine war isn’t the main culprit for high diesel prices and Ukraine has every right to raise the pressure on Mr. Putin to stop his conquest.
But then they spend the article’s length justifying the latest “deal” after just having admitted that the entire premise for it is in fact null and void: As stated, what incentive could Trump possibly have to need this “deal” if stopping the diesel strikes actually has no effect on him, as they clearly write above?
In reality, every immoral party on the Western side is playing its own double dealing game of trying to “have their cake and eat it too”. Trump himself likes to pretend the energy crisis is related to Ukraine only to dull the blow from his Iran failures—the entire situation is a murky hodgepodge of deception and misleading obfuscations from every involved party on the Western side.
Nervous EU leaders have picked up on Zelensky’s latest rashness and have urged him to pipe down before Trump does something truly game-changing to Ukraine:
EU leaders are set to urge Volodymyr Zelenskyy to tone down his public criticism of Donald Trump, amid concerns that the Ukrainian president’s increasingly blunt remarks risk further damaging already strained relations between Washington and Kyiv.
Now amidst all the latest scandal between the US and Ukraine, Zelensky has revealed the budgetary black hole for Ukraine has gotten ever deeper, announcing that he needs partners to cough up an additional mind-warping €155 billion dollars:
When you see numbers like these casually flung around by Zelensky, Russia’s long term strategy of attrition against Ukraine begins looking more and more promising. It is simply difficult to believe that Europe can sustain these numbers for much longer given the political-economic costs the declining continent is bearing.
The latest fiasco has exposed cracks in this European “solidarity” that is Ukraine’s final life line:
Politico reports that Zelensky is now fighting to regain attention from a Europe that has become fatigued with pulling the stiffening corpse of the Ukrainian state along the muddy road of its own future:
COMPETING FOR THE SPOTLIGHT: Volodymyr Zelenskyy faces an uphill battle to keep Ukraine at the front of EU leaders’ minds at today’s summit in Brussels.
The EU has been Kyiv’s staunchest backer throughout its full-scale war with Russia. But mounting concerns about energy prices at home and an impasse over the bloc’s budget risk drowning out everything else, including Ukraine’s fight for survival.
A “European leader” told the outlet that Zelensky’s attempts to win back attention from a crisis-ridden Europe is now a “tall order”:
Zelenskyy will remind leaders what’s at stake for his country when he addresses them this morning, but it’ll be a tall order to shift their attention from other priorities, a European leader who was granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions told Playbook.
As a sign of how bad things have gotten, they write that this was the first time since the start of the war that Ukraine was not the top item on the summit’s agenda, despite Zelensky’s attempts at regaining the spotlight by way of a guilt-trip-inducing campaign:
Is that a snub? It’s a sign of how crowded the EU’s list of priorities has become that, for the first time since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine was not the top item on the summit agenda. That honor went to the EU’s budget.
Underscoring Kyiv’s desperation, the Ukrainian president arrived in Brussels a day earlier than scheduled to meet with leaders bilaterally, including French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday night. He will also hold his first meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar on Friday morning.
What are Ukraine’s options? According to Atlantic, it’s to continue aimlessly “putting more pressure” on Putin by way of Ukraine’s promised “M&M” operation that was meant to overwhelm Russia’s airports, crippling civilian travel in order to raise social discontent against Putin.
Long thought to have failed and been committed to the dust-bin of history, the campaign is allegedly only “just getting started”, according to its architects:
The two architects of this campaign told me that it is only just getting started. So far, Ukraine has used long-range drones to clog the airspace around Russian airports without striking them directly. In one incident this weekend, debris from a downed Ukrainian drone reportedly fell on the airport in Sochi, causing a fire at an administrative building. Zelensky has not yet allowed his military to proceed with the original plan for operation M&Ms, which called for much more aggressive tactics.
According to the authors of the plan, the more ambitious version would use AI-guided drones to circumvent Russian air defenses and hit airports in Moscow and other cities. These drones will soon be manufactured at scale, one of the authors of the plan told me.
But most revealing in the linked Atlantic piece was something we had long predicted: that the reason it had initially failed was because Ukraine did not have the resources to scale it up to the necessary level.
The author writes:
At the time, Ukraine did not have the means to act on Zelensky’s threat, one of the officials behind the operation told me. The military lacked the enormous fleet of specialized drones required to shut down Moscow’s airports for an extended period of time, he said. In response to Zelensky’s declaration, only one foreign carrier, Air Tanzania, briefly suspended flights to Moscow. Larger airlines, such as Emirates and Flydubai, continued as normal. “We didn’t follow through,” the Ukrainian official told me in frustration.
Ukrainian arms manufacturers are still developing the specialized drone fleet, which relies on an AI-enabled technique known as map matching to identify targets and decide when to strike, the second person behind the plan told me. He said Ukraine first used this new type of drone in combat in mid-September, when a handful of them struck targets in the Russian-occupied region of Donetsk. They have not yet been deployed at scale against Russian airports, he added.
It appears Zelensky’s ambitions grew beyond the limitations of his own failing state, though the article appears to be optimistic that the attempts will increase in the future as Ukraine “scales up” these AI-powered wunderwaffen that are meant to harass Russian airports to the point of Putin’s capitulation.
The article even ends on a sour note, with one of the Ukrainian figures behind the airport terror plot openly admitting that if US support for Ukraine ceases, then his country will have no choice but to “sue for peace”, or in other words, surrender:
For some members of Zelensky’s team, that act of American betrayal felt less like a setback for their strategy to win the war than it did the end of their best hope for victory. Even one of the officials behind the plan to shut down Moscow’s airports told me that if the U.S. sides with Russia, Ukraine would have little choice but to abandon the ladder of escalation and sue for peace. “There’s a realization now that Russia will not collapse because of its difficult economic situation,” he said.
The final portion says it all—we need to make life miserable for Russian citizens to force Putin to “accept a truce”:
In offering a lifeline to Russia’s energy industry, Trump made the U.S. an obstacle to the Ukrainian strategy of wearing down the Russian economy and exhausting its population. “That means we need to change our strategy,” the official said. “Russia will not collapse, at least not now.” Ukraine still has plenty of ways to make life miserable in Russia, but it will likely take more than that to force Putin to accept a truce.
This is what the West’s entire plan now essentially amounts to: two-bit terror.
It seems the Western world, and particularly that of Europe, has become a circus. The latest breaking headline from Politico gives us insight into the type of important matters being handled by Europe’s finest at the European Council summit while they gas themselves up—no pun intended—over Ukraine’s plight:
POLITICOEurope@POLITICOEurope
7:33 AM · Oct 16, 2026 · 163K Views
What can we say? There’s something rotten in Brussels.
There’s no question that this cabal and its primitive political circus continues to stink.