Trump on Ukraine Starshield outage: “Not my order”

[Financial News] U.S. President Donald Trump denied allegations of White House involvement in an outage affecting Starshield, a military satellite communications system used in Ukrainian drone operations. Amid reports that the U.S. government had deliberately restricted access, he said he had never issued any related order.
According to foreign media reports on the 17th, Trump told reporters at the White House on the 16th, local time, before departing for the state of Georgia, “I didn’t do it,” referring to the Starshield outage.
He added, “I don’t know who else did something like that,” and claimed, “As far as I know, [Starshield] is in exactly the same state as before.”
Earlier, local media reported that Ukraine’s access to Starshield had been deliberately restricted on the orders of the White House. The White House denied the reports.
Starshield is a military system based on Starlink, a satellite communications service operated by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX. The U.S. Department of Defense has authority over access and control. On the 14th, Musk said on X (formerly Twitter) that U.S. military authorities decide the system’s speed and usage restrictions, and that final authority rests with the U.S. president. Trump said Musk was likely not behind the outage either.
The Ukrainian military has connected U.S.-backed Starshield to drones and used it to attack key Russian facilities or shoot down Russian military drones. But an outage this week disrupted drone attack and defense operations, and Ukraine was reportedly hit by Russian drone strikes.
Trump also said he hoped Russian President Vladimir Putin would attend the G20 summit being held this December in Miami, Florida.
Trump said, “I don’t know whether he’ll attend [the G20 summit], but I hope he does.” Earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he had invited Putin to the summit on the 23rd of last month and hoped he would attend.
[email protected] Kim Hyun-ji Reporter