WASHINGTON (Sputnik) – SpaceX notified the US Defense Department in September that it can no longer donate its Starlink services to Ukraine and requested that the US government fund it instead, CNN reported.
SpaceX is not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time, a company official said in a letter to the Defense Department as quoted by the report on Thursday.
The report said that SpaceX will end up spending more than $120 million donating its Starlink services to Ukraine this year and expects it could cost about $400 million to continue providing those services next year.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to Sputnik’s request for comment on this matter.
The report noted that Ukraine’s commanding general Zaluzhniy, requested 8,000 more Starlink terminals in July, especially since about 500 Starlink terminals were destroyed in the battlefield each month. However, a consultant for SpaceX advised him that request could not be met because of the financial burden to the company.
SpaceX said they responded by asking Zaluzhniy to instead take up his request to the Department of Defense.
Moreover, the report, citing sources, said wide-ranging outages of Starlink’s services on the frontlines of the conflict in Ukraine are affecting the Ukrainian armed forces’ ability to make further advances.
The Financial Times first reported the outages which resulted in a “catastrophic” loss of communication, a senior Ukrainian official said. In a tweet responding to the article, Musk didn’t dispute the outage, saying that what is happening on the battlefield is classified.
Sources told CNN that Starlink is the main way Ukraine’s armed forces communicate on the battlefield, and the Ukrainian government and its military efforts are entirely dependent on it.
“Ukraine knows that its current government and wartime efforts are totally dependent on Starlink,” the person familiar with the discussions said.
SpaceX founder Elon Musk said previously via Twitter, in response to these outages, that what is happening on the battlefield is classified.
Musk is the biggest shareholder of the privately-held SpaceX. In May, SpaceX disclosed that its valuation had risen to $127 billion and it has raised $2 billion this year, CNBC reported.
Last week, Musk faced a barrage of criticism and personal abuse by Kiev’s regime – including from Zelensky – after presenting in a series of tweets his peace plan to end the war. It would include giving Crimea to Russia and re-do referenda, supervised by the United Nations this time, in the four regions Russia recently illegally annexed. Musk also argued privately last month that Ukraine doesn’t want peace negotiations and that if they went along with his plan, “Russia would accept those terms,” according to a person who heard them.
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