Who Holds the Switch

Day 233. Around 1 a.m. on Oct 14, with Russian missiles and drones in the air over Ukraine, the satellite links Ukraine’s military uses to fly its drones started cutting out for anything moving faster than about 100 miles an hour. The system is Starshield, the military version of Starlink, and the cap landed hardest on the interceptor drones Ukraine sends up after Russia’s jet-powered Shaheds. Zelensky said those Shaheds come in at more than 400 km/h, about 250 miles an hour, while some of the drones chasing them had been slowed to as little as 70 km/h, about 43. Service came back in stages over the next few days, and Ukraine’s government says it still isn’t where it was.

The chase, at two speeds. Illustrative geometry, not a model of any real engagement; the 400 and 160 km/h figures are Ukraine’s government’s. Graphic: Four Fingers News.

SpaceX builds and runs the network, but it belongs to the United States, and the company’s owner, Elon Musk, says Starshield is “owned and controlled by the US government” and that limits on its use are set by the US military. Reuters reported on Oct 15, citing two US officials and a Western official, that the instruction to slow the service for Ukraine came from inside the White House. The US government’s official position, as the Secretary of State put it on Saturday, is that nobody ordered it and that it “sort of happened.”

The switch sits there because of what happened in September 2022, when Ukraine asked for Starlink coverage near Crimea for an attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and Musk, who was then providing the service for free, refused. The Pentagon’s answer was to put the service under contract, and in 2024 it paid to bring the number of Ukrainian terminals on Starshield to about 3,000, so that no private citizen could make that call again. It worked, in the sense that the decision no longer belongs to a businessman. It belongs to a state, and a state has interests of its own.

This week those interests and Ukraine’s pulled in different directions over one thing, Russian oil. The United States is fighting a war with Iran that’s cut shipping through the Strait of Hormuz to roughly a third of its prewar level, diesel set a record in September, and the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at its lowest since 1982. Every Russian refinery Ukraine sets on fire takes more fuel off a market that’s already short. So on Oct 11 the United States announced an energy ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, though neither government had been told, and the next day US intelligence officials warned Ukraine’s embassy that all intelligence sharing would stop if Ukraine hit Russian energy sites again. On Friday the United States suspended the new sanctions and tariffs it had written into law in September, two days before they’d have taken effect, and Russia’s envoy for economic matters, Kirill Dmitriev, called it “an important and truly historic moment.”

Ukraine’s interests run the other way, and they’re just as plain. The refineries pay for the missiles hitting Ukraine’s power plants, and striking them is the one form of pressure on Russia that Ukraine can apply with its own hands, without asking anyone. Zelensky counted 76 Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy system in the week of the ceasefire, and last night Ukrainian drones set St. Petersburg’s oil terminal on fire. Russia, which wasn’t asked to give anything up, ended the week with the new sanctions suspended and its enemy’s drones slowed.

Russia’s interests are the oldest of the three, and its government has stated them for nearly two decades. In February 2008 the US ambassador in Moscow, Bill Burns, wrote to the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, that Ukraine in NATO was the brightest of all red lines for Russia’s elite, not just for Putin, and Russia has gone to war over Ukraine twice since. Its government treats a Western-aligned Ukraine on its border the way the United States treated Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, as a question of survival, and the four regions, the land bridge to Crimea and now a security zone along the border are how it intends to settle that question on the ground.

The thing none of them will settle is what the end of this war is supposed to look like. Ukraine’s official answer is its 1991 borders, Crimea included, which would mean taking back territory a nuclear power treats as its own soil, from a country with more than three times Ukraine’s population. Russia’s answer, set out in June 2024 and repeated by the Kremlin as recently as this June, is all four regions it annexed on paper in 2022, including the parts it doesn’t hold, along with a Ukraine that formally gives up on NATO. It hasn’t taken them in more than four years, and that says less about what its army could do than about the price it’s been willing to pay, because what’s left of them includes Zaporizhzhia, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, and storming cities that size would mean mass death on both sides, so Russia has chosen to grind instead. This week Putin added to it, saying a 660 km “security zone” Russia is carving out of Sumy and Kharkiv, outside those four regions, won’t be up for negotiation, and the Kremlin says its troops already hold about 70% of that line. Russia has never been conquered, and when it’s lost wars before, in Crimea in 1856, against Japan in 1905, at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and in Afghanistan in 1989, it lost by deciding at home that the war cost more than it was worth. That’s the logic behind Ukraine’s refinery campaign, which aims at exhaustion rather than conquest, and it’s the campaign the United States spent this week slowing down. The United States, which holds more of the levers than either side doing the fighting, hasn’t said what outcome it’s working toward, only which Ukrainian strikes it won’t support.

Realists have a name for this: alliances are instruments, and a patron backs a client’s war exactly as far as it serves the patron. The cleanest case on record is one the United States ran against its closest ally. In July 1956 Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, nationalized the Suez Canal, and that fall Britain, France and Israel secretly agreed to take it back by force. The United States didn’t want to be tied to European empire in the same week it was condemning the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and it worried the Soviets would step in on Egypt’s side, so it wouldn’t back them. As British paratroopers landed at Port Said, money ran from the pound, and the United States refused to support it and made clear Britain’s emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund would wait on a ceasefire. Britain’s reserves fell $279 million in the first few days of November. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, who’d drawn up the plan for retaking the canal by force that August, was among the first in the cabinet to see that Britain couldn’t go on, and the ceasefire took effect at midnight on Nov 6. Britain had the army, the fleet and the will, and it stopped anyway, because the money it needed to keep fighting ran through someone else’s hands.

Two levers, 70 years apart. Graphic: Four Fingers News.

The difference between 1956 and this week isn’t the lever, which works the same way it always has, but the signature and the destination. In 1956 the pressure ran through the Treasury and the IMF’s board over several days, everybody in London knew whose hand was on it, and the United States said plainly what it wanted, which was the invasion stopped before the Soviets could make use of it. This week’s lever was a speed setting on a satellite network, changed in the middle of a Russian barrage, and the government that owns the network says no one changed it and hasn’t said where it’s steering. It can afford not to say, because it’s the only country at this table that can’t lose anything it can’t live without. Two oceans and the world’s reserve currency make every war the United States joins optional, which is how it left Saigon from a rooftop in 1975 and Kabul from an airport in 2021 and went home both times. Russia and Ukraine have no home to go back to if they lose this one. Two countries are fighting what each believes is a war for its survival, and the switch on that war sits with a third whose stake in it is the price of diesel.

Sources (24), on the site.