Zelensky Asked Trump for a Favor From Elon Musk
· The Atlantic
During closed-door talks at the White House on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky laid out a plan for his country to survive another winter of war with Russia. For it to work, President Trump would need to call in a big favor from his ally Elon Musk. But according to two officials familiar with the conversation, Trump was noncommittal, leaving the future of the plan in doubt.
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The new proposal, which has not been previously reported, offered the United States a way around sending Ukraine advanced air-defense missiles, known as Patriot interceptors, which the war in Iran has dramatically depleted. Instead, Ukraine would expand its use of another American technology: the Starlink satellite-communications network, which Musk controls.
Zelensky asked Trump to secure Musk’s permission for the use of Starlink to guide drone strikes inside Russia, according to the two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. (A third official confirmed Zelensky’s request.) Up to now, Musk has allowed the Ukrainians to use Starlink only on their own territory, including in Crimea and other regions that Russia has occupied. Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, has restricted the use of Starlink inside Russia.
Ukraine’s campaign of long-range drone strikes has therefore employed less reliable targeting methods, including onboard computers with AI-powered navigation tools. These weapons have been effective at hitting large infrastructure sites in Russia, such as oil refineries and warehouses. But, in his talks with Trump on Tuesday, Zelensky explained the need to hit much smaller and more mobile targets, especially the ballistic-missile batteries that Russian forces have used to hit cities across Ukraine. Last night, as Zelensky and his entourage traveled home through Poland, Russia launched more than 70 missiles, killing at least 10 people in one of the biggest salvos of the war. One of the rockets exploded in Poland.
Starlink offers the most precise means available to steer Ukrainian drones to the Russian missile launchers, many of which are mounted on trucks dispersed across Russia. During his visit to the U.S. this week, Zelensky asked to meet with Musk to talk about his plan for targeting these launchers, but the billionaire declined the invitation, according to one person involved in the discussions. Musk and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.
When they met at the White House, Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart that he would consider the requests, but he did not indicate whether he would eventually grant them, one official told told us. Trump did tell Zelensky that he would talk with Musk about it but did not offer a timetable for that conversation or for his eventual decision.
Trump has made no secret of his desire to bring the Russia-Ukraine conflict to a close, and has been frustrated at how long it has taken. One of the officials told us that his eventual decision on Zelensky’s proposal would likely be largely based on whether he felt it could help hasten the end of the conflict. If he thinks that using Starlink would enable Ukraine to push Russian President Vladimir Putin to the negotiating table, then Trump may support it. But if he feels it would only escalate matters, then he likely would not, one official told us.
[Read: Zelensky makes his pitch to Trump]
Trump, of course, has been highly deferential to Putin for more than a decade now, and that has hardly changed during this war. Although he has flashed his frustration with the Russian leader at times, he has mostly stayed skeptical of Ukraine’s cause and its chances. But, one official told us, Trump has been impressed with Ukraine’s recent ability to strike deep within Russia with its drone technology and has sensed that Kyiv has some momentum in the conflict (Trump loves to be associated with winners). The meeting remained convivial and Zelensky invoked the memory of the late Senator Lindsey Graham when making his pitch.
With the war in its fifth year, Zelensky emphasized to Trump that Ukraine needs to counter the missile threat before the onset of winter, when Russia may again try to use these weapons to knock out Ukraine’s power grid and heating systems, according to the two officials familiar with the talks.
Without the ability to hit launchers inside Russia, “we have no clear path through this winter,” one of the officials told us. Last winter, Ukraine still had a limited supply of Patriot interceptors to shoot down Russian missiles and protect its most crucial infrastructure. But the war in Iran has since depleted roughly two-thirds of the U.S. stockpile of these interceptors, according to an analysis published this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research institute based in Washington, D.C. The CSIS report estimated that the U.S. now has as few as 759 of the most advanced Patriot rockets.
Zelensky asked the U.S. to send 300 of these for Ukraine to use this winter. Trump has demurred. Instead, during his talks with Zelensky earlier this month in Ankara, he promised to give Ukraine a license to make its own Patriot interceptors—though Ukraine would not be able to produce them at scale for years.
In the Tuesday meeting, Zelensky argued that Starlink could offer a faster and cheaper answer to the ballistic-missile threat from Russia, according to two of the officials familiar with the conversation. Ukraine already has the long-range drones needed to target missile launchers inside Russia. The Ukrainian company that produces many of them, Fire Point, uses various guidance systems to get around the ban on deploying Starlink inside Russia.
[Read: Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove]
One of the company’s co-founders, Denys Shtilerman, told us that drones equipped with Starlink could prove far more effective than Patriot interceptors in neutralizing the Russian ballistic-missile threat. “Instead of shooting down the arrows, we would strike the archers,” he said.
Inside its own territory, Ukraine has already used Starlink-enabled drones to create what it calls a “kill zone” along the front line—a no-man’s-land, dozens of miles wide, where drones can target any Russian forces that seek to advance. With permission to do the same thing inside Russian territory, “we could widen the kill zone to 500 kilometers,” Shtilerman told us. “If they increase the range of their strikes, we would widen the kill zone all the way to Siberia if needed. The technology would allow us to do that.”
Musk has long resisted the use of Starlink in warfare. The system depends on the world’s largest constellation of satellites to provide a high-speed internet connection to anyone with a Starlink subscription and a receiver. At the start of the Russian invasion, in 2022, Musk provided Ukraine with Starlink receivers free of charge. Ukrainian hospitals, emergency workers, and government agencies used them to stay online despite Russian attacks on the country’s internet infrastructure. The armed forces of Ukraine soon began using Starlink to coordinate troop movements and pilot drones, and the system became the backbone of Ukraine’s military communications.
During some of Ukraine’s most brazen strikes against Russian forces, Musk got cold feet. “How am I in this war?” Walter Isaacson quoted him as asking in his 2023 biography. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good, peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
That year, the Pentagon began contracting with SpaceX for the communications services it provides to Ukraine’s armed forces. The company also created a separate network, known as Starshield, for use in defense and national security. During his talks with Trump on Tuesday, Zelensky suggested that if Musk refuses to allow the use of Starlink for strikes on Russia, the Pentagon could give Ukraine access to the Starshield network for the same purpose, two of the officials told us.
One of them added, however, that Starshield would not work as well for Ukraine. “It’s more expensive, more complicated, more difficult to integrate into our systems,” the official said. “We have long figured out how to fly drones on Starlink. It would not be hard for us to send them across the border. But Starshield is a somewhat different system. We would need to figure out how to integrate it.” That leaves Starlink as the cheapest and most reliable guidance system available for Ukraine’s long-range drones.
From Musk’s earlier decisions, it can be hard to discern a coherent strategy toward the war in Ukraine. He has used Starlink in ways that each of the warring sides has perceived as helping the other. A few months into the Russian invasion, Musk began to complain about the spiraling cost of providing Ukraine with Starlink service. He refused a Ukrainian request in September 2022 to use Starlink in an attack on Russian warships in Crimea, arguing that the operation risked a nuclear response from the Kremlin.
The following month, Musk published a four-point plan for peace in a post on Twitter. (He would buy the social network for $44 billion a few weeks later.) His peace plan hewed closely to Russian demands, including a provision for Ukraine to remain “neutral” after the war. In response, Zelensky posted his own Twitter survey, asking whether people preferred the Musk who supports Ukraine or the one who supports Russia. Andriy Melnyk, who served as Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany at the time, also shot back at Musk’s peace plan: “Fuck off is my very diplomatic reply to you @elonmusk.”
In Zelensky’s wartime government, the official who cultivated the strongest ties with Musk and SpaceX was Mykhailo Fedorov, the chief architect of the Ukrainian drone program. Early this year, while serving as minister of defense, Fedorov persuaded Musk to shut off the Starlink receivers that Russian forces had been using to fly their own drones in Ukraine. But Fedorov lost his job this month in a government reshuffle, which cost Ukraine its main point of contact with Musk. “Fedorov has a super constructive relationship with him,” a Ukrainian official told us. “So the timing is very bad to install a new minister.”
[Read: Elon Musk moves against the Russians in Ukraine]
One person close to Fedorov told us that, in the weeks before he was fired, the minister lobbied Musk and various other contacts in the U.S. to allow the use of Starlink for drone strikes into Russia. Fedorov received assurances from Musk that it would be possible “if Trump says to do it,” the person said. The talks broke off, he added, after the government reshuffle. (Fedorov did not respond to a request for comment.)
The Trump administration could have its own reasons to balk at Zelensky’s request. “It’s one thing to let Ukraine do this on its own territory,” the Ukrainian official said. “It’s another thing to use American technology on the territory of Russia to take out their air defenses, their launchers for ballistic missiles. This is an unfriendly act. I don’t know how Russia could react to that.”
Russia recently deployed new methods for interfering with Starlink signals in Ukraine. Earlier this month, a set of documents was published that appeared to show Russia plotting with China to destroy Starlink satellites, through either hacking, jamming, or knocking them out of orbit. The documents, allegedly produced by China and obtained by The Insider, highlighted the risks Musk faces in helping Ukraine fight the war.
His willingness to broaden that assistance could depend on the leverage Trump has over Musk—and his desire to use it for Ukraine’s benefit. Earlier this month, Trump seemed open to Zelensky’s strategy for pressuring Russia to negotiate a peace deal. “It’s an escalation,” Trump said when asked about Ukraine’s strikes on oil refineries and military targets deep inside Russia. Seated beside Zelensky in Ankara, Trump added: “But it’s also an escalation that could help lead to an end.”