Yes, you may recall some controversy a few years back when Musk made some threats along those lines.
There are alternatives if you only need short range, or if you can tolerate high latency. And of course there are fire-and-forget cruise missiles that don't need communications at all.
But there aren't all that many other options. Historically, satellite internet companies like Iridium, Globalstar and Teledesic have not fared well.
It was only made to appear a controversy for clicks and Ukrainians (understandably) trying to bend the rules.
The thing came with a clear limit "this thing works in these cells of this big hex grid".
And they drove it off that hex grid. Plan and simple.
Its like if the US-supplied HIMARS came with some built-in limit that it cannot be used to target known Russian nuclear installments, and they'd try to do that.
It's not that those things are unquestionable, but they are limits that would need US consultation as US obviously doesn't want the thing to escalate from being a defensive war to something else.
Well, per other comments, Starlink terminals apparently do work in Russia.
And Musk did exactly that per numerous reports. Given his erratic behavior since around 2018, it's not hard to believe. The other day he was literally threatening to stop Dragon launches for NASA.
The geoblocks are quite hard. The only situation where Russians have managed to use them for a short while is when they've managed to capture a terminal, and it hasn't been cut off because it's been unclear who was in control of it, and Ukranians benefit more of them as they've built a lot of things and process around them as it such a massive battlefield advantage if used right.
>Given his erratic behavior it's not hard to believe
Congratulations, you've managed to slip in to a sea of misinformation and media spin. Place a check on this in 5 years, these things tend to be silently put under the rug. It's like you're saying it wouldn't be a surprise if all future Falcon 9 rockets just blew up because they've done so at testing and because Starship does so too. Learn some distinction.
Because the US military/govt has a say in what US companies sell to foreign militaries and that's what the restrictions were at the time. Remember this was early on in the full invasion.
Iridium works extremely well for what it was designed for – truly global, low latency communications without requiring a directional antenna. Unfortunately, that also means very low data rates.
It only gained packed-switched data with the second generation satellite network, but data rates are still very low (think hundreds of kbps, and I believe even that needs high-gain antennas).
~Iridium~ devices were bricked in the first days of the invasion, iirc. That's why starlink was such a big deal, and that's why the usmil wanted it "yesterday" after it proved itself in ua. They had to set up a dedicated unit to deal with starlink, as every branch was trying to get it on their own and complicated purchasing. That unit / project was also called starshield, confusing the matter with the other starshield project that uses starlink buses + ng sensor packages.
edit: it was Viasat not Iridium, I got them mixed up.
Interesting how the US goes absolutely ballistic about some random dude violating the "Computer Security Act" on a small scale, but didn't react at all to this massive, incredibly impactful, attack.
it didn't impact Americans. it impacted us Europeans but at the time this went down we were too dependent on Russia's cheap gas (and, frankly, lacked the military power) to raise the appropriate level of stink.
Hell we let Russia freely execute dissidents (Skripal or the Berlin Tiergarten murder come to my mind) and tolerated a land-grab war by little green men in 2014. Either of these actions would have warranted serious consequences, the Crimea/Donbas grab would be a casus belli if you ask me. But again, we were too busy sucking Putin off for cheap gas.
The US does not want to go to full scale, open war with Russia.
So the US will downplay or ignore some amount of aggression from Russia to do so.
If the US wanted to go to war with Russia, we would be playing up some rather minor thing, like sending a missile system into "Europe" or something.
When that Ukrainian SAM fell in Poland and killed a farmer, there was a late night emergency meeting between a lot of very important people from NATO countries to decide WTF to do. If the west wanted to fight Russia, that meeting would have resulted in an Article 5 declaration of some sort.
Russia is behind the sabotage/blowing up of a Czech Republic arms depot. If the west wanted to go to war with Russia, that could have also been an instigating event.
Russia will continue to get passes for "minor" acts of war as long as the west does not agree with sending citizens to die in a war.
That we don't equip Ukraine with more than enough war material to do whatever they are capable of, however, is fucking stupid.
"Some" is an understatement lol. Here in Germany 3.800 (!) wind turbines lost remote control (and thus were forced offline) until the terminals could be changed because their command uplink was via Viasat.
There are alternatives if you only need short range, or if you can tolerate high latency. And of course there are fire-and-forget cruise missiles that don't need communications at all.
But there aren't all that many other options. Historically, satellite internet companies like Iridium, Globalstar and Teledesic have not fared well.