Every year, the Polish taxpayer sends roughly $50 million to SpaceX so that Ukraine's soldiers can stay online. That is the figure Poland's foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, has given for the bill his government pays for Ukraine's Starlink subscription, as recalled this month by EU Perspectives.

This month, the service Poland pays for was slowed down.

"Hey, Elon Musk, big man, are you playing politics with your products again?" Sikorski wrote on X, adding that Poland, as a customer, was "watching you". It was a good line. It was also a perfect summary of Europe's position: the customer who pays the bill, writes angry posts, and has no say over the product.

A switch on the other side of the Atlantic

What happened is still disputed, which is part of the problem. The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk himself ordered a slowdown of the military-grade Starlink service Ukraine depends on. Reuters reported that the order came from the White House, days after Washington pressed Kyiv to stop striking Russian refineries, according to Politico. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said decisions on Ukraine's access were for SpaceX, not the administration. Pick your version. In each one, the decision was taken in America.

The effect on the ground is less disputed. Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to the Ukrainian president, said SpaceX had limited Starlink terminals in motion to 100 miles per hour, and that the armed forces received no prior notice. "Our partners are depriving us of one of the few chances we have to defend the country against jet-powered Shaheds," he said. Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking after last week's EU summit, was blunter. "It was a very dangerous and unpleasant surprise," he told reporters, according to Politico. "When the speed limits were lowered, we became incapable of shooting [them] down."

Zelensky said his partners had told him there were "signals from the White House" that the capabilities would return. So Ukraine's air defence now waits on signals.

Brussels' answer: a programme, a negotiation, a date

Europe's reply has been loud and procedural. A Commission spokesman said SpaceX "must urgently restore full operational capacity", Eunews reported. The EU's foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas was more honest: "in the short term Europe is unable to replace it."

She is right, and it is worth understanding why. The EU does have a pooled government satellite service, Govsatcom, launched in January. Ukraine has been negotiating access to it since March, Politico reports, with no breakthrough. Norway and Iceland, both outside the EU, signed their deals earlier this year. A country at war has spent seven months in talks about joining a European communications pool. Under current plans, commercial satellite capacity joins Govsatcom only at the beginning of 2027.

Then there is IRIS², Europe's planned answer to Starlink. On 7 August, the Commission signed the implementation agreement with the SpaceRISE consortium. The constellation was expanded to 348 satellites, and the Commission proudly announced that the revised schedule "brings the first launches forward to 2029".

First launches. In 2029. For a war that needs bandwidth tonight.

The same press release, in explaining why Europe needs more secure military capacity, found room for a paragraph on "climate change and environmental degradation". Defence and security are the "primary drivers", it says, but the satellites also respond to pressures that "contribute to displacement, migration, and instability". You cannot accuse Brussels of lacking ambition. Only urgency.

The billionaire is not the problem

It is tempting, and very popular in the European Parliament, to make this a story about one American's moods. "It is unacceptable for Ukraine's defense — and therefore Europe's security — to depend on the goodwill of a single American billionaire or on Donald Trump's decisions," the French centrist MEP Christophe Grudler told Politico.

Quite. But whose fault is that dependence? Musk did not stop Europe building rockets, launching constellations or buying in bulk from its own industry. SpaceX simply did it first and cheaper, while European programmes moved through committees, co-financing rounds and the careful sharing-out of industrial work between member states. A private company can switch a service down. Europe spent the last decade making sure it had nothing of its own to switch on.

The same lesson keeps arriving in different packaging: American early-warning data on Russian missiles, American Patriot interceptors, American satellite internet. Each time, Europe discovers a dependency, calls it unacceptable, and launches a programme that will be ready in four years.

What fast would look like

There are things Europe could do in weeks, not years. It could close the Govsatcom deal with Kyiv now and fix the legal details afterwards; Norway and Iceland show it can be done. Governments could buy commercial capacity directly from European operators already in orbit, such as Eutelsat's OneWeb low-orbit network, and hand it to Ukraine without waiting for the 2027 pooling. And the capitals that pay for Ukraine's Starlink, Poland first among them, could use that leverage in the contract rather than on social media.

None of that requires a new strategy. It requires treating Ukraine's connectivity as an emergency, not as a programme line.

Poland pays the bill. Someone in America decides the speed. Europe's own satellites start going up in 2029. Until that changes, every fine speech in Brussels about strategic autonomy comes with a buffering symbol.

Update, 24 October 2026: On Saturday, Ukraine's defence minister, Yevhenii Khmara, said Starlink and its military-grade Starshield service had been restored, with his ministry recording a stable connection at speeds above 400 km/h, Politico reports. A day earlier, Ukrainian officials had said drones were still losing signal above 160 km/h. The speed is back. It came back the way it went: by a decision taken in America.

Update, 25 October 2026, 12:40: Elon Musk has now said that SpaceX did restrict Ukraine's Starlink service, after earlier denying any deliberate throttling. Writing on X on Saturday, he said Ukraine's military had "violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people" and that "that loophole was closed last week", while saying Starshield is controlled by the US government, the BBC reports. Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov called the post "very strange", saying Starlink-guided drones in Ukraine are already capped at 70-90 km/h and do not work over Russia. So the question this piece asked, who turns the dial, now has an answer from the man holding it. Europe still has nothing of its own to turn.