But Starlink isn’t an instant fix, and Musk can’t exactly wave a wand at Ukraine’s internet disruptions. “It’s nice for him to offer, but that doesn’t mean it will actually have a meaningful impact right away,” Brian Weeden, a space-policy expert at the Secure World Foundation, a nonprofit group that promotes peaceful and responsible uses of space, told me. The entire sequence—the plea, the response, the actual effect—reveals some of the limits of Musk’s influence: His outsize reputation doesn’t always match what he can actually control.

For any Ukrainians to make use of Starlink, they have to get their hands on one of these Starlink terminals, which are made by SpaceX. (For regular customers, a Starlink kit costs $499, and the service is $99 a month.) SpaceX did not respond to questions about the number of active terminals in Ukraine right now, or how many terminals the company plans to send to the country.

These terminals must be within several hundred miles of ground stations that communicate with Starlink satellites before the satellites beam signals down to those dishes. There are no such stations inside Ukraine, but there are enough in neighboring countries to “provide service to the whole of Ukraine without issues,” Mike Puchol, the chief technology officer at an internet start-up who also runs a tracker of Starlink coverage, told me.

If and when Ukrainians can get connected, there’s also the matter of the service’s quality.