Zelensky: Many Shaheds hit substations because of the Starshield speed limit – more than 2,300 Russian drones in a week

Volodymyr Zelensky now links Russian strikes on Ukrainian electricity substations directly to the speed limit that still applies on Starshield terminals, the military version of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network. “The Russians are targeting substations with Shaheds. And many of these strikes get through precisely because speed restrictions remain on Starshield terminals along the front line and in the temporarily occupied territories,” the Ukrainian president wrote on Sunday, November 15 on X and Telegram. In the same post he gave the weekly toll of Russian attacks: more than 2,300 attack drones, 1,590 guided aerial bombs and 15 missiles of various types.

Zelensky had already denounced the 161 km/h limit on Thursday, November 12, when he spoke of the limit being back on Starshield and drones that cannot catch the jet-powered Shaheds. The new element on Sunday is the link to the power grid just before winter. Ukrainian interceptor drones lose contact with their operators when they exceed 161 km/h and cannot chase the jet Shaheds, he explained. “We look forward to the lifting of the restrictions. The protection of lives and of Ukrainian energy infrastructure ahead of winter depends directly on it,” he added. He instructed the Foreign Ministry, the Defence Ministry and the Office of the President to work as closely as possible with the US government and SpaceX.

According to the Ukrainian president, during the night and morning of Sunday Russian forces hit energy infrastructure in Zaporizhzhia and in the regions of Sumy, Odesa, Zhytomyr and Kirovohrad. Railway infrastructure in the Dnipro, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia regions was also attacked, and strikes were recorded in the Donetsk and Kyiv regions. The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russia launched 132 long-range drones overnight on November 15, of which 78 were jet-powered. This is exactly the type of target Zelensky is talking about; details are in our report on the Russian drone attacks of the previous days.

Russia has been resuming mass attacks on Ukraine’s energy facilities since the end of the summer. On Friday, November 13, Zelensky gave the issue a political dimension too, telling journalists that a limit that applies only over the occupied territories amounts to partial recognition of them as not Ukrainian. “If you impose restrictions there, you are already partly recognising the temporarily occupied territories as not ours,” he said. In the United States, as the Kyiv Independent notes, the bipartisan Congressional Ukraine Caucus asked the Trump administration and SpaceX for full explanations and for the immediate restoration of full Starshield access. The same issue arose in October, when the order for the Starshield “brake” was attributed to the White House.