Ukraine war briefing: Zelenskyy says Starshield restrictions continue on ‘entire front line’

Curbs on SpaceX system are making it hard to intercept drones and sending bad signal to Russia, says Ukrainian president. What we know on day 1,725

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said ⁠speed restrictions remain in place on the US Starshield satellite communications system, hampering ⁠the Ukrainian military’s ability ⁠to ​operate inside the country. The continued restrictions made it hard to intercept jet-powered and other ⁠drones and sent a bad signal to Russia on dealing with land seized by Russian forces ⁠in the war, the Ukrainian president also said on Friday. “Unfortunately, the speed restrictions remain in place ​along the entire front line ‌and in temporarily-occupied ‌territories of Ukraine,” he said in his nightly video address. “I expect ‌the ministry of defence and the foreign ministry, together with all relevant structures in the United States, will work through this issue.” Ukrainian officials said in mid-October that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had abruptly capped the speed of Starlink and its Starshield military version amid tensions with ​the US over Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries. Service was restored on 24 October.

Zelenskyy said on Thursday Ukrainian military units had recorded ​disruptions to ​Starshield over several days. He repeated that the restrictions “limit our ​ability to ‌intercept jet-powered ​Shaheds [Iranian-designed drones] ​and counter other drones”. “They also send Russia a signal that America may somehow treat our temporarily-occupied land differently,” he said. “We expect the speed to be restored.”

Russia attacked a hospital in the centre of Kyiv, close to several western embassies, after Zelenskyy’s comments on the throttling of Starshield . Three people were injured when a drone smashed into the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics at 3am, hitting the second floor of the hospital and an adjoining 19th-century building in the capital, reports Luke Harding. Meanwhile, Russia claimed to have shot down nearly 1,200 Ukrainian drones overnight, one of the largest swarms sent by Kyiv. It said at least four people were killed in the southern region of Volgograd.

The EU’s foreign policy chief warned against “walking into the traps that Russia is setting” as she said Moscow was trying to start a debate about European security in order to divert attention from its aggression, reports Jennifer Rankin. “We have one aggressor and one victim, and the aggressor does not have security concerns,” Kaja Kallas said on arrival at an EU leaders’ summit in Dublin. In talks on the Ukraine war, Russia has revived its hardline demands for a total overhaul of European security – demands that were rejected in 2021.

Russia has been rocked by two car bomb attacks that killed a senior military figure and seriously injured a suspected intelligence agent, in the latest in a series of assassination attempts believed to have been orchestrated by Kyiv. On Friday morning a car bomb exploded in southern Moscow, severely injuring Sergei Zavorotniy, 72, a former senior aide to Ukraine’s exiled former prime minister Mykola Azarov, reports Pjotr Sauer. The blast came a day after a car bomb explosion in St Petersburg killed a senior Russian military official. The official has not been publicly identified but a local broadcaster cited sources as saying the victim was a colonel in the Russian air force.

Russian forces launched strikes on two ⁠Ukrainian cities on Friday, killing one person ⁠and injuring more than ⁠50 ​in the south-eastern city of Zaporizhzhia and killing ⁠two more in the Black Sea port of ⁠Odesa, regional officials said. In Zaporizhzhia, a ​five-storey apartment ‌building was ‌hit and seriously damaged. A rescue worker was killed when a concrete slab collapsed during operations to clear rubble, regional governor ‌Mykhailo Semikin said. In Odesa, two people died in an ⁠attack on a private residence, ​said the city’s military administration hed, Serhiy Lysak. Five people ​were ​injured.

A general in Ukraine’s SBU security service suspected in a serious corruption case was released from pre-trial detention on Friday after posting $1.2m bail. Footage on Ukraine’s TSN.ua news site showed Serhiy Duka after leaving prison proclaiming his innocence and thanking his SBU “brothers-in-arms” who had raised the bail money. Duka was detained on 4 November as part of an anti-corruption operation targeting an alleged criminal group that investigators say involved members of the SBU, the prosecutor’s office, the police and organised crime.