Brovane
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- Dec 18, 2001
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There have been some reports that starlink units are working in the east in what were just recently occupied areas. So I'm not sure how much to believe the geo-location blacklisting.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-china-disapproved-sending-starlink-ukraine-2022-10
But recently, FT reported that Ukrainian forces have faced some outages of their Starlink devices on the frontlines in recent weeks. Roman Sinicyn, a co-ordinator at a foundation that donates Starlink systems to the Ukrainian armed forces, told the publication the outages are the result of SpaceX representatives attempting to prevent Russians from using the technology.
From this it seems like SpaceX is trying to prevent Russians from using Star-link units that had been captured from Ukranian forces or the Russians got the units through other means.
Without a more fulsome explanation it's hard to tell if the occupied territories are switched off because of concerns about Russia capturing Starlink units or due to Russian requests. Though it could be both I guess given recent uh proposals from Musk. I suspect that in the future Ukraine won't want to depend on such a mercurial commercial service provider...
It is never a good idea to depend on one service provider for critical needs. Earlier in the war, Russian hackers bricked a bunch of Via-Sat downlink units.