Ukraine's self-trained techie army keeps Musk's Starlink network running, even in a war

In most of the world, fixing broken receivers for Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service is fairly straightforward: Users can get help by entering a support ticket with the company online. “Please make sure,” the website helpfully reminds customers, “to update your shipping address in the event replacement hardware is shipped.”

But what if your location is a trench in war-torn eastern Ukraine that’s obstructed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s drones, glide bombs and infantry?

That’s where Dmytro Stetsenko comes in. The 45-year-old chief executive officer of Kyiv-based Stetman LLC employs 140 technicians and other staff members to repair or upgrade Starlink equipment and provide alternatives, part of a sprawling cottage industry of backstreet workshops tinkering with the gear for military and civilian use.

“Thousands of Starlink terminals require repairs every week,” typically because of malfunctioning chips or connectors, Stetsenko said. “They work fine for civilian use — when you mount a satellite dish and it stays in place — but when you connect and disconnect them repeatedly, they eventually fail.”

It’s not just the technology that’s prone to break down. As US President Donald Trump prepares to meet his Russian counterpart in Alaska on Friday to discuss possible ways to end the war, Ukraine faces the consequences of relying on foreign support — be it for weapons, political backing, or indeed Starlink. Such dependence means Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy may have little choice but to accept an unappealing deal that might include land swaps amid diminished backing from war-weary international partners.

And despite his on-and-off feud with Trump and the subsequent exile from the White House, Musk remains a central figure in the war. The critical yet fragile equipment that he provides with Starlink is one reason Ukraine has managed to withstand the overpowering Russian assault, more than three years after the full-scale invasion.

Earlier this year, billboards declaring “Thank you, Elon Musk” popped up in Kyiv after relations between Musk and Zelenskiy had badly deteriorated. The system has become indispensable for Ukraine’s troops across the steppes and fields in the country’s east and south. Starlink is also vital for operating some types of drones, the defining weapons of the war.

Musk’s network, which connects to more than 8,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit, has more than 6 million users worldwide. A large share of Stetman’s orders comes from frontline military personnel, who depend on Musk’s satellites to navigate in the field. The importance of maintaining Starlink highlights an uncomfortable fact of this war: the system — alongside the mercurial Musk — has become a linchpin in Ukraine’s military operations.

Now there’s growing pressure to reverse any support. Vice President JD Vance has already warned that his country is “done with the funding of the war.”

Thanks to a post-Soviet culture of repairing almost everything, Ukraine has an abundance of technicians who can revive Starlink devices. One such self-taught expert is Oleg Kutkov, 37, who began tinkering with Starlink gear back in 2021 and now fixes broken receivers and uploads DIY tutorials to YouTube.

Kutkov says Starlink is so popular, he can order a dish from a local reseller and get delivery within one hour. Ukraine has dozens of repair shops specializing in Starlink jobs, he estimated, “almost all of them are military.”

The techie community gets some assistance from Ukrainians outside the country. Volodymyr Stepanets, who has lived in Poland since 2019, has created an online community called “the People’s Starlink” to unite donors, IT specialists and other enthusiasts eager to maintain equipment that’s more akin to consumer technology than military-grade hardware.

Although he estimated that Ukraine may have more than 300,000 Starlink terminals, including inactive devices, “we are using gear in the field that was never meant for that environment,” said Stepanets, a former adviser to the commander of Ukraine’s Signal and Cybersecurity Troops. “What we need is to ‘repackage’ it into solutions that can withstand field conditions.”

Highlighting the dependence on Starlink, a global outage in July left Ukraine particularly vulnerable. “This incident — which lasted 150 minutes, a long time by wartime standards — highlights existing bottlenecks,” Major Robert Brovdi, commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces, wrote on Telegram on July 25. “We should take this into account and diversify the network.”

This dependency is complicated by the unpredictability of Musk, the SpaceX chief executive officer whose stance toward Kyiv has ranged from emphatic support, including early mass supply of Starlink terminals, to growing hostility, with the billionaire criticizing Zelenskiy and echoing some of Putin’s talking points.

In 2023, Musk revealed that he had vetoed Ukraine’s use of Starlink to attack Russian forces in Crimea.

The company didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals,” Musk wrote on his social media platform X in March of this year. “I am simply stating that, without Starlink, the Ukrainian lines would collapse, as the Russians can jam all other communications!”

But all of Ukraine’s efforts to wean itself off Starlink have shown limited success.

In the days after Zelenskiy’s acrimonious Oval Office meeting with Trump in February, the stock price of Eutelsat Communications, which operates the leading alternative network as well as older satellites in higher orbits, soared amid optimism that Ukraine and other European countries would steer more business its way. For now at least, the spread of alternative technologies, both foreign and domestic, remains modest.

Starlink is popular among soldiers, who know all too well the system’s shortcomings. The main vulnerabilities include maintenance complexity, overheating and high visibility from the air, making soldiers on the ground potentially easy targets.

Other hazards are more biological in nature. The cables on Starlink receivers are a popular snack for mice.

At the same time, the devices are “quite valuable due to their ease of use and rapid deployment,” said Oleksandr, 41, a brigade communications officer who asked to conceal his last name for security reasons. Then again, the network isn’t always reliable, added Taras, a 38-year-old junior sergeant who also asked not to give his family name.

“Starlink’s internet connection on the frontline is often poor,” he said, “so we have to back it up with wired or mobile internet wherever possible.”

The procedure for repairing broken equipment varies from unit to unit. Oleksandr’s brigade does the work itself. Taras’ unit sends broken terminals to a service center based in the central city of Dnipro. Soldiers often rely on the nation’s postal service to send their orders to inconspicuous workshops and receive them back. Stetman has its own website and customer support service for the Starlink re-equipment project and for its own satellite service.

In the meantime, the service provider has gained invaluable experience working on Musk’s system, said Stetsenko. That’s put Ukraine’s Starlink repair business in a position where might eventually also be useful during peacetime.

“The kind of infrastructure we now have in Ukraine — if there were no war — would likely land us a multimillion-dollar contract with SpaceX,” he said. “They would gladly pay for repair services in this part of the world.”