This seems to be connected to the story I wrote here. If you check out the update, Elon Musk has now denied having anything to do with the throttling of Ukraine's access to Starshield. And this makes sense because Ukraine's access is controlled not by Musk but by the U.S. government which runs the military version of Starlink.

Musk isn't denying that access to the system was throttled, he's just denying that he had anything to do with it. He's saying this was a decision made by the U.S. government, i.e. by President Trump. 

Specifically, the change made overnight limited the speed at which objects using the service could travel down to a maximum of 100 kph. That's much slower than Ukraine's interceptor drones, which are used to take down Russia's jet-powered Shaheed drones, often travel. In effect, we shut down Ukraine's best remaining defense to Russian attacks.

This afternoon, some connectivity was restored for drones moving at up to 160 kph. That's still about half the top speed of Ukraine's best interceptors.

CBS News has a story up today saying that wasn't the only decision made this week to hamper Ukraine's defenses. We also allegedly stopped warning Ukraine about incoming attacks.

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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine "received no advance warning from our partners" when Russia launched a ballistic missile barrage at Kyiv and other locations early Tuesday. 

The sources said American officials told their Ukrainian counterparts the system used to detect Russian missile launches had failed due to "bad weather." Ukrainian officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the topic, told CBS News they did not believe the excuse, and they accused the U.S. instead of "playing" with the system.

When Russia launched another wave of ballistic missiles around 3 a.m. local time on Wednesday, the sources said the U.S. early warning system appeared to be working again. 

Maybe the "bad weather" excuse would be plausible if it had happened in isolation. But the fact that this happened at exactly the same time access to Starshield was cut makes it pretty clear (at least to me) that this was intentional. Trump is sending a message that Ukraine better get on board with his demands to stop striking Russian oil refineries or else. The problem is that Putin isn't listening.

Frankly, if you gave Putin a Christmas wish list for the war, stopping these attacks on his refineries would be at the top of his list. Why Trump has decided to play Santa Claus for an anti-American dictator like Putin is beyond me. Is he getting advice from Tucker Carlson again? Here's what Trump said about this a couple days ago.

Publicly, Putin has made it very clear that he has no interest in a deal with Ukraine and no intention to follow Trump's lead on an energy ceasefire.

So it seems that Trump is applying pressure to the country that is following his lead and ignoring the country that is refusing. This obviously makes no sense and isn't going to lead to a ceasefire or an end to the war. It's just going to lead to a bunch of dead Ukrainian civilians and a celebration at the Kremlin.