Margins
Short pieces on events, books and ideas, from political economy to culture and philosophy.
One Wave in Four
Russia’s attacks on Kyiv expose Ukraine’s dependence on American intelligence and Starlink as Zelenskyy describes pressure to halt refinery strikes and questions why one missile wave arrived without advance warning.
One Wave in Four
Russia fired ballistic missiles at Kyiv on Tuesday night in an opening attack and three later waves, and Ukraine was warned of the three later waves. Yurii Ihnat, the spokesman for Ukraine’s air force, said no warning came for the first. The United States can spot a Russian ballistic missile launch the moment it happens, and American officials have passed those launches to Kyiv before so the city can sound its sirens and aim its air defenses. An Iskander takes a few minutes to reach a target in Ukraine. The warning is measured in those minutes.
On Tuesday Donald Trump told reporters at the White House, “We are helping them, and we are sharing intel.” Ihnat’s account and Trump’s sentence can both be true. Intelligence shared on three waves is still intelligence shared.
The same night SpaceX capped the speed of the Starlink terminals mounted on Ukraine’s drones, according to Serhii Beskrestnov, an adviser to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. A slower drone is an easier target for Russian air defenses. By late Wednesday the drones were back up to 100 miles per hour, and a Ukrainian official said that was still too slow to catch Russia’s jet-powered drones. Elon Musk then wrote on X that the military version of the network belongs to the US government and that any limit on its speed is decided by the US military and in the end by the president.
Zelenskyy told the Financial Times what came before. In his account, American officials told Ukrainian officials that if Ukraine kept striking Russian oil refineries, the intelligence would stop. Trump wanted the refineries left alone. He had blamed Ukraine’s strikes for record diesel prices in America, and on Friday he struck a deal with Vladimir Putin to import Russian diesel before the midterm elections. Ukraine paused its strikes on Russian energy for three days. The warning still did not come. Kyiv was told it was a technical failure, the kind weather causes, and Zelenskyy answered, “It was not a technical problem, it was the will.” When he asked Washington for more Patriot interceptors, he said, the answer was a slower Starlink.
Russia did not pause. Overnight into Wednesday it fired 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 drones at Kyiv, the Kyiv region and Kharkiv, and it hit all three of Kyiv’s combined heat and power plants. At least 600,000 people lost power. Kyiv police said five people were killed in the capital.
On Wednesday in London, Zelenskyy said the strikes on Russian refineries would resume. The pause had lasted three days and bought no warning. Trump’s sentence from the White House is still true. It covers the three waves Kyiv was told about.