Ukrainian soldiers in active combat lost access to Starlink satellite internet terminals on Tuesday evening, causing the failure of several military missions.
Serhiy Beskrestnov, a military technology adviser to President Zelenskyy, said terminals travelling at more than 100mph suddenly lost connectivity in what appeared to be a targeted outage linked to the current political situation.
The disruption came as Russia launched 39 ballistic missiles and 120 attack drones against Kyiv and Kharkiv overnight, hitting power plants and substations and leaving at least 600,000 people without electricity.
The US provided no advance warning of the strikes for a second consecutive night, having shared such intelligence with Ukraine routinely for years.
Starlink terminals are distributed and managed by Elon Musk's SpaceX and are a key component of Ukraine's battlefield operations.
Musk previously cut access to Ukrainian forces during an offensive that had seized a small amount of Russian territory.
The outage follows sustained pressure from the Trump administration on Kyiv to halt long-range strikes on Russian oil refineries, which Trump has linked to elevated diesel prices in the US.
Zelenskyy said the scale of the Russian attack represented an unprecedented show of disrespect toward the United States, adding that Russia did not consider Trump's statements strong.
