Romanians often picture the war in Ukraine as a line of arrows on a map. The article argues that the war on Romania’s border is fought on several levels at once: a Russian military satellite tracking an American one in low orbit, a transformer station deciding whether Sevastopol has light, explosive sea drones a few hundred metres from the Neptun Deep platform, and satellite-link speed treated as a bargaining chip in Washington. Between those levels fly identified and unidentified drones. The uncomfortable question for Bucharest, it says, is whether Romania will recover, analyse and publicly attribute every drone that falls on its territory or in its waters.
On 24 October 2026 two reports arrived from Ukraine on the same day. In the morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky, Defence Minister Yevhenii Hmara and sources in the Defence Ministry in Kyiv confirmed that SpaceX Starlink and Starshield terminals were working again without restrictions, with stable links at speeds above 400 kilometres per hour. The same day, occupied Crimea woke in darkness: Sevastopol had power in only 40 percent of apartment blocks, on a schedule of two hours with light and six without, and the energy bridge by which Russia supplies the peninsula across the Kerch Strait was no longer working. The Institute for the Study of War recorded both facts in its daily assessment.
On the night of 13–14 October, without warning, Starshield terminals, the military package of the Starlink network, began to drop as soon as they exceeded about 160 kilometres per hour. The limit concerned the speed of the terminal, and was therefore shaped for Ukrainian drones. Presidential adviser Serhii Beskrestnov, known as Flash, said several military operations had been compromised. Front-line units reported outages even at 110–120 kilometres per hour. The most exposed were interceptor drones used against new Russian Shaheds with jet engines, which fly at more than 400 kilometres per hour, as well as helicopters hunting slow drones and Ukrainian medium-range strikes in occupied territory.
Authorship of the decision remained disputed. Reuters, citing informed sources, wrote that the order came from the White House. The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk personally imposed the restrictions. Musk replied that Starshield limits are set by the US military and, ultimately, by the US president. He recalled that Starlink is meant for civilian or defensive activity, and added that the time had come for Zelensky to leave. The White House denied any involvement, and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth also rejected a Pentagon role.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said Ukraine had asked for Starshield access for strikes deep into Russia and did not have it. Beskrestnov told the BBC that the speed limit, together with delays in passing US intelligence, looked more like deliberate pressure than a technical fault. Kyiv said it was studying alternatives, from Amazon’s Leo network to the OneWeb constellation. According to the same adviser, Russia is already looking for ways to counter Starlink, so dependence on one supplier is a double vulnerability, toward the adversary and toward the partner.
Kyiv then sent cars fitted with Starlink terminals into European Union states; they drove at more than 180 kilometres per hour without interruption. Zelensky concluded that the restriction applied only on Ukrainian territory and was a planned operation. The European Commission called for urgent restoration of the service. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul criticised the limit, noting that Berlin pays part of the subscriptions and that the German-funded contract runs until April 2027. Voices in Congress in Washington threatened measures. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had already said he preferred that such technologies not be used for military purposes.
On 10 October Washington temporarily suspended sanctions on Russian fuel as diesel prices rose, a rise the article links to the war with Iran. President Donald Trump asked Zelensky to stop attacks on Russian refineries immediately and said it was time for Ukraine to have a new president. The next day he announced on his social network an energy truce with immediate effect, which Zelensky learned about from the press. Moscow confirmed nothing, and Trump also mentioned delivery of three million tonnes of Russian diesel. A White House official later told Axios that the understanding covered only refineries and that a deal on power plants and electricity networks might follow only afterwards.
Ukraine has a single, barely functioning refinery, while Russia has a whole network, so a refinery-only truce was an almost one-sided concession by Kyiv. Strikes on the Taman station and on energy nodes in Crimea do not touch any refinery. Full restoration of Starlink coincided with this new campaign. The article says that may be a calendar coincidence, or a sign that Ukrainian limits were renegotiated along with the type of targets accepted.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, the Operational Headquarters of Krasnodar Krai announced that drone debris fell at a substation near Bely, in Temryuk district, about 69 kilometres from the Ukrainian border. NASA’s FIRMS fire-monitoring system showed thermal anomalies at the 500-kilovolt Taman station, the node through which all four lines of the energy bridge to Crimea pass. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces reported hitting five energy nodes in the operation Crimea Switch Off.
Russia’s Energy Ministry spoke of an external impact on energy infrastructure and of outages in Crimea and in the occupied regions of Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk. Occupation leader Yevgeny Balitsky in Zaporizhzhia acknowledged a hit on a main grid node outside the region. Sergey Aksyonov, head of the occupation administration in Crimea, announced restrictions on power and water, and Sevastopol governor Mikhail Razvozhayev confirmed the rationing schedule. Local Telegram channels reported simultaneous outages in Sevastopol, Simferopol, Yalta, Feodosia, Alushta and Dzhankoi, and NetBlocks recorded a collapse of internet traffic on the peninsula.
In July 2017 and June 2018, when Taman left Crimea without power, the Energy Ministry and the authorities in Simferopol cited heat, voltage jumps and protection systems. In 2026 the same ministry speaks of an external impact. The Russian business paper Expert had described cutting off Starlink as one of the levers by which Trump can pressure Zelensky.
Taman is not a new target. It was hit on 27 February with thirteen drones, again on 20 March and on 20 August, when an attack caused an almost peninsula-wide outage. In early July Ukrainian drones disabled twelve substations in occupied territory, ten of them in Crimea. The exiled Russian paper Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that the north of the peninsula had been without power for more than a week, and Aksyonov admitted that some localities had been without electricity for more than twelve days.
Until 2014 Crimea received about 70 percent of its electricity from mainland Ukraine. After pylons on the lines from Kherson were blown up in November 2015, the peninsula went through a winter of rationing. In 2015–2016 Moscow built the energy bridge through Taman. Technical failures at Taman in 2017 and 2018 had already left the whole peninsula without power for hours.
Hours after Trump’s announcement of 11 October, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha accused Russia of already breaking the truce. Russian missiles and drones had hit a thermal power plant in Kharkiv, and DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy supplier, announced new outages in Kyiv. Neither those strikes nor Ukrainian attacks on substations in Crimea touch refineries. The same month the Russian company Yandex announced the closure of a data centre in Vladimir region after a drone attack.
The Russian military satellite Cosmos 2612, launched in April 2026 from the Plesetsk cosmodrome with five other military satellites and on an undeclared mission, manoeuvred for more than two weeks toward ICEYE-X36. That is a synthetic-aperture radar satellite, able to see through cloud, smoke and darkness, operated by the American subsidiary of the Finnish company ICEYE and registered in the United States. The firm, led by Polish chief executive Rafał Modrzewski, expanded cooperation with the Ukrainian military in January, promising imagery in tactical time, and also supplies data to Polish military intelligence. It has never confirmed which of its satellites work for Kyiv. One radar image the company has shown publicly depicts the bridge over the Kerch Strait, the corridor beside which the power lines from Taman run.
According to a Royal United Services Institute report, from May four of the six Russian satellites had aligned their orbits with the orbital plane of ICEYE-X36. On 12 October Cosmos 2612 entered the target’s orbit at about 555 kilometres altitude. On 15 and 16 October it cut the distance from more than 300 kilometres to about five, then closed to about half a kilometre and held position over the weekend of 17 October. At speeds of about seven kilometres per second, that approach consumes fuel deliberately. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, a former NASA researcher, considers it the first low-orbit rendezvous of two active satellites without the consent of one owner. US Under Secretary of State Thomas DiNanno denounced at the United Nations behaviour compatible with operating weapons in orbit.
The US firm LeoLabs lists possibilities from intelligence collection and close inspection to intimidation and preparation of future operations. Clayton Swope of the Center for Strategic and International Studies believes the likely aim was to direct some form of energy at the satellite, from jamming to a laser. Dutch astronomer Marco Langbroek warned that such proximity allows local jamming of the radar or of links to the ground. Russian propaganda media boasted that the spy satellite had been caught up with. In July 2020 US Space Command had described manoeuvres by Cosmos 2543 as an anti-satellite weapon test. Russian analyst Georgy Trishkin told The Insider that a direct attack remains unlikely because it would be treated as aggression against an American asset.
The withdrawal began on 18 October, two days after Trump signed an executive order that removed tariffs and most economic restrictions on Russia. Swope suggests Putin chose not to strain the relationship just as he was nearing an understanding with Washington. The Russian satellite did not go far: it continued at the same altitude, about 400 kilometres behind the target. Two other satellites from the same launch are due to align with the orbit of ICEYE-X37. Swope describes orbital proximity, in the absence of an international rule defining a hostile manoeuvre, as a tap Russia can open and close according to the state of negotiations.
For Russia, the article says, Crimea is a fixed aircraft carrier: the base of the Black Sea Fleet, airfields, air-defence radars, depots and repair shops. A peninsula running on generators and on two hours of power in eight is a military base wearing down slowly, with winter still ahead.
For Romania the article draws two lessons. A power or communications system with a single critical point is an open invitation, and Taman demonstrates it. The Starlink episode shows that an essential military service supplied by a private American company can be choked overnight, without an explanation or an acknowledged author, according to the state of a political negotiation in Washington. For a country on the eastern flank of NATO that is building its defence around the same technologies, the conclusion offered is redundancy: the European constellation IRIS², alternatives such as OneWeb, and national communications that do not depend on the disposition of one person. If Russia can track in orbit an American satellite also used by Polish military intelligence, nothing guarantees it will not do the same tomorrow with the space capabilities other eastern-flank allies, including Romania, rely on.