US intelligence assessed that Ukraine recaptured around 400 square kilometers of territory after Ukrainian officials disabled thousands of Starlink terminals used illegally by Russian forces. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, said the Starlink shutdown, together with middle-strike drones, helped shift battlefield momentum in Ukraine’s favor.
A newly declassified US defense intelligence assessment has revealed that Ukraine’s strategic disabling of thousands of illicit Russian Starlink terminals triggered a catastrophic command-and-control failure for Moscow, paving the way for Kyiv to liberate nearly 400 square kilometers of occupied territory earlier this year.
The advance was made possible, in part, by a significant weakening of Russia’s front-line capabilities, according to a US Defense Intelligence Agency report compiled for the Pentagon Inspector General.
The findings, first reported by Bloomberg, underscore how heavily Moscow’s forces had come to rely on smuggled commercial American technology to run their daily battlefield operations.