U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Saturday (February 18) that the U.S. government has held talks with Elon Musk about the use of Starlink satellite network services in Ukraine.
U.S. space exploration technology company SpaceX said this month it had taken steps to prevent the Ukrainian military from using the company’s Starlink service to operate drones in the war against Russia, Reuters reported.
“I can’t share any of the conversations that we had,” Blinken said in an interview with NBC TV that aired Sunday. , it can only be said that we had a dialogue.”
SpaceX has privately shipped a large number of Starlink terminals to Ukraine, and the Ukrainian military can use these terminals to connect to about 4,000 satellites in Earth’s low space orbit that SpaceX has launched to communicate with each other.
Musk has said that Russia tried to jam Starlink’s signals in Ukraine, but SpaceX countered it by strengthening Starlink’s software.
Separately, Reuters reported on Sunday that Ukrainian officials urged U.S. lawmakers to pressure President Joe Biden to supply Kiev with F-16 fighter jets to boost Ukraine’s ability to strike Russian missile groups.
The lobbying took place during a meeting between Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba and other U.S. Democratic and Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives during the Munich Security Conference this weekend, the report said.
“They told us they wanted to overwhelm the enemy’s air defenses so they could fly their drones behind the Russian front,” Sen. Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and former Navy fighter jet, said Saturday night.
When asked last month whether to approve Ukraine’s request for the F-16s, President Biden said he would not.
This year’s Munich Security Conference focused on Ukraine, taking place on the eve of the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. After a series of setbacks for Russia, the two sides are now locked in fierce battles on the battlefield, mainly in the Donbass region in the east.
A total of four delegations from both houses of the U.S. Congress participated in this year’s Munich Security Conference. It was the largest attendance by U.S. lawmakers since the forum began in 1963, showing bipartisan U.S. support for Ukraine.
Senator Kelly and three other lawmakers who spoke to Reuters about the talks with Ukrainian officials said they believed there was growing support in Congress for supplying Ukraine with the F-16s. The F-16 is one of the most versatile jet fighters in the world.
Calls to provide Ukraine with advanced fighter jets have grown after the United States, Germany, Britain, France and other countries agreed last month to supply Ukraine with advanced main battle tanks.
Ukrainian Air Force pilots currently fly Soviet-made MiG-29 fighter jets to launch American-made AGM-88 High-speed anti-Radiation Missile (HARM). The missile is capable of acquiring and locking onto the electronic transmission of the radar of a surface-to-air missile launch group.
Ukraine says their pilots could be more effective against Russia’s S-300 and S-400 air defense missiles if their pilots could use the F-16’s more advanced electronics to launch the AGM-88 Hamm missile.
Senator Kelly said they argued that they needed aircraft that could accomplish the mission of suppressing enemy air defenses, arguing that they could be more effective at destroying S-400 air defense missile groups.
While it typically takes at least a year to train pilots in all the capabilities of the F-16, Ukrainian pilots can be taught the limited capabilities they need in a few months, he said.
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