Zelenskyy says Starlink limits persist as he seeks more EU funding

Zelenskyy asks EU for €70 billion more for 2027 defense

Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday in Brussels that the Ukrainian military’s access to the Starlink satellite internet service has not returned to previous speed levels, even as the US had signaled the limits would be lifted. “Our defence ministry is in touch and my partners, they told me that there were signals from the White House that they would return these capabilities,” Zelenskyy said after meeting European leaders. “Have they returned to the previous speed limits? No. But is it coming back now? Yes.”

Reuters reported Friday that the suspected order to slow the service came from inside the White House, according to two US officials and a western official briefed on the matter. The officials did not identify the White House official who made the decision but said the Pentagon had been informed that the SpaceX Starshield service — the military version of Starlink, which is produced by Elon Musk’s SpaceX but controlled by the US government — had to be slowed.

The reported throttling was intended to prevent Starshield from being used on drones flying above 100 mph. Zelenskyy called the speed reductions a “very dangerous and unpleasant surprise,” noting that Ukraine uses the service to support its most effective air defense systems against Russian jet-powered drones. Neither the Starlink limits nor the suspected US withholding of intelligence on incoming Russian ballistic missile strikes has been officially confirmed.

Hours before the Brussels meeting, Trump had called Ukraine’s renewed strikes on Russian oil refineries “a disgrace” and criticised Zelenskyy in an interview with the Newsmax television channel, after a purported “energy ceasefire” between Russia and Ukraine failed to take hold. “All he’s doing is making the world oil price higher,” Trump said. “Well, I think that’s a disgrace.” Energy analysts told the BBC that the US-Israeli war on Iran was having the biggest impact on diesel export volumes, although the Ukraine war was also significant.

The Brussels summit offered Zelenskyy a stage to align European strategy at a moment of renewed friction with Washington. He was applauded by the heads of state and government of the EU’s 27 member states upon arrival. He said afterward that he had heard “only support” when asked about reports that European leaders had asked him to dial down his criticism of Trump.

Zelenskyy used the meeting to press for additional financial support, telling EU leaders that the war would cost Ukraine €155 billion in 2027 and that Kyiv needed at least €70 billion more from the bloc for defense, weapons and resilience. “This is a realistic amount,” he said, according to a transcript of his remarks.

The EU is currently providing Ukraine with regular payments from a €90 billion funding plan agreed last December, intended to cover two-thirds of Kyiv’s civilian and military needs for 2026 and 2027. The remaining third was to come from other “international partners,” including the UK, Canada, Norway and Japan. With that framework now projected to fall short, the question of Russia’s €210 billion in assets frozen inside the EU has returned to the table.

Last year, the EU decided against directly using the frozen Russian assets, opting instead for an EU-backed €90 billion loan funded by profits from those holdings. Belgium, which hosts the vast majority of the frozen funds, has remained strongly opposed to deploying the assets themselves, fearing it would be left to carry the financial burden if the plan went wrong. Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said before the summit that Zelenskyy would “probably look everybody straight in the eye and say: thank you for the €90bn, but that money is going to run out because a war is a very costly thing.”

Zelenskyy proposed a possible alternative: an EU-controlled custodian structure to manage the frozen assets and reduce the risk of their being unfrozen or divided up. “We need something like a special EU-controlled custodian to reduce the risk of them being unfrozen and divided up among those who clearly do not want what is best for Europe or an end to this war,” he said. The European Commission has been reluctant to advance new variants of the assets plan, fearing renewed opposition from Belgium and other skeptical member states.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the EU had supported Trump’s energy ceasefire but accused Russia of ignoring it and instead escalating its attacks. “We have seen that Russia did not respect it, not a single minute,” she said, adding that the EU intended to increase pressure on Moscow through a 22nd round of sanctions. “We will not lift any sanctions unless Russia stops the war,” von der Leyen said.