On October 11, a confidential memo went out to military officers across Ukraine, urging them to brace for a catastrophe. Donald Trump had decided earlier that week to ease U.S. sanctions on Russia and to begin buying its diesel fuel. Based on that shift in White House policy, the memo foresaw another act of American betrayal: the loss of access to the Starlink satellite network, which Ukraine uses to operate its drone fleet.

The document warned that Elon Musk, the creator of Starlink, might soon restrict service in Ukraine, and it urged users of the technology to “keep all communication alternatives to Starlink on standby—ready for immediate use—and develop contingency plans.” Two days later, the warnings began to come true. Starlink faltered across the war zone, grounding drones and halting military operations. In one case, it led to the loss of Ukrainian naval drones in the Black Sea, according to two people familiar with that mission.

The memo predicted worse to come. It came from a nongovernmental organization called Narodnyi Starlink, or “People’s Starlink,” which helps the armed forces of Ukraine acquire and operate this technology. In the memo, the group’s founder, Volodymyr Stepanets, envisioned several ways Musk could restrict service. The worst-case scenario—a total shutoff—would result in a cascade of disasters, potentially leading to Russia’s victory in the war. One senior U.S. military officer told us that “without Starlink, the war would grind to a halt.”

Musk himself has suggested that might be his goal. In a series of posts on X over the weekend, he admitted to causing last week’s outages, and he lashed out at those who call for greater military aid to Ukraine. “I have nothing but UTTER CONTEMPT for the virtue-signaling evil warmongers who push for endless slaughter and offer no realistic solution to the conflict,” Musk wrote. “May you burn in hell.”

Since the disruption, Ukraine and its allies have scrambled to find a replacement for Starlink, which relies on the world’s largest constellation of satellites to deliver high-speed-internet access anywhere in the world. But nothing comparable exists. The most promising effort in Ukraine to build such a system faced a major setback this summer, when its architect, Dmytro Stetsenko, died of apparent heart failure at the age of 46. European attempts to replicate Starlink are years away from matching its scale, and most of these efforts depend on Musk’s aerospace company, SpaceX, to launch their satellites into orbit.

Russia, by contrast, has its own fleet of space rockets, and it is racing to field a network of satellites that can rival Starlink. The system, known as Rassvet, or “Sunrise,” would give Russia an “asymmetric advantage” in the war, says Andrey Liscovich, a co-founder of the Ukraine Defense Fund, which has helped secure thousands of Starlink terminals for the Ukrainian military. “They will be precise enough to fly these low-cost, jet-powered drones through a window anywhere in Ukraine,” Liscovich told us. Without Starlink, Ukraine would not be able to respond.

Vladimir Putin said today that Russia has stayed in touch with Musk about Starlink. “Elon Musk is a genius, really a genius,” the Russian leader said at a televised summit in Moscow. He praised SpaceX for taking the lead in the race to develop this technology. “We are only taking the first steps,” Putin said of Russia’s answer to Starlink. “We are in close touch with our American colleagues, including Mr. Musk, because in orbit it is very important not to get in each other’s way.”

This account of Musk’s turn against Ukraine is based on interviews with more than a dozen U.S. and Ukrainian officials, military officers, drone manufacturers, and experts on Starlink. Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive military operations and private negotiations. Several of them have dealt with Musk and his company directly since the start of the war, in 2022, and they have seen his views on Ukraine shift from generous support to outright hostility.

If anything can yet restrain Musk from abandoning Ukraine, it may be his own financial interests. His company has earned hundreds of millions of dollars from the Starlink terminals operating in the war zone. Liscovich estimates there are well over 250,000 of them. In the past, SpaceX, which runs Starlink, has reportedly charged the Ukrainian government $2,500 per terminal each month, and it has cut off service when bills go unpaid. Earlier this month, when U.S. military officials asked SpaceX about the outages in Ukraine, the company advised switching to an upgraded contract to restore Ukraine’s access, U.S. officials told us. (Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions for this article.)

In June, SpaceX held the biggest initial public offering in history, earning a valuation of roughly $1.8 trillion. Revenue from Starlink keeps SpaceX investors happy and bankrolls Musk’s other projects, including his obsession with colonizing Mars. If he pulls the plug on Starlink in Ukraine, other countries could deem the service unreliable and accelerate the race to build an alternative. But those projects will not be ready until next year at the earliest. Until then, the world’s richest man will be largely free to decide Ukraine’s fate.

[From the November 2026 issue: Choose your overlord]

When the war began, Musk seemed eager to help Ukraine defend itself. Russia used missile strikes and cyber weapons to take down Ukraine’s digital infrastructure in the opening days of the invasion. To keep the country online, Musk donated thousands of Starlink antennas to its hospitals, power plants, government ministries, and various humanitarian causes.

Soon, the Ukrainian military began using the service to pilot its drones and stay connected in the war zone. The service provided a critical advantage: The Russians had no access to Starlink and no way to jam its signal, which allowed Ukraine’s drones to crisscross the battlefield, dropping bombs on Russian troops.

Images of these attacks spread online in 2022, and they caused alarm at SpaceX headquarters in Texas. “More and more people became uncomfortable,” a former SpaceX engineer who worked on the system’s development told us. Some of his colleagues left the company in protest. Their team had designed Starlink to give people internet access in places where broadband cannot reach, like hiking trails and ships at sea, not to wage a war.

Musk also had apprehensions. In September 2022, Ukrainian officials asked him to switch on Starlink in the Black Sea. They wanted to use it in a sneak attack against Russian warships near the occupied region of Crimea. Musk refused. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars,” he said around that time to his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

At the end of 2022, Musk announced the launch of a service called Starshield. Reserved for military clients, it costs far more to use than Starlink. In Ukraine’s case, the U.S. government has paid for a lot of that service, handing Musk’s company a sizable windfall. In exchange, the Pentagon gets more control over Ukraine’s access to the satellites. Colin Kahl, then the U.S. undersecretary of defense, negotiated this arrangement with SpaceX, and he later told The New Yorker that it would “prevent Musk from turning off the switch.”

But, for the most part, the Ukrainian military did not transition to using Starshield. It continued to use regular Starlink antennas, the kind available at Walmart and other retailers around the world. Their service costs as little as $30 a month, compared to as much as $25,000 for Starshield. The fine print in the Starlink user agreement bans its use for military purposes. But Musk’s company did not enforce that rule in Ukraine. It maintained the pretense that Starlink would be reserved for peaceful purposes, while the military would rely on Starshield antennas, largely paid for by American taxpayers. The reality was quite different. “They’re using it for everything,” the senior U.S. military officer told us of Ukrainian reliance on Starlink. “Drones, command and control, tactical communication on the battlefield.”

The U.S. government has not disclosed how many Starshield terminals it has provided to Ukraine. But Ukrainian officials and experts told us that they account for less than one percent of all the terminals in the war zone. The rest are regular Starlinks purchased on the retail market, including thousands bought in bulk for Ukraine by the governments of Poland and Germany. “Officially, these were supposed to be for humanitarian use,” a person who has negotiated with SpaceX on Ukraine’s behalf told us. “But everybody knew that they are going to the military.”

This wink-wink arrangement put Ukraine in a dangerous spot. To operate its drone fleet and stay online in the war zone, its armed forces had no choice but to break the rules of Starlink service. “It’s much cheaper that way, and easier to scale,” a Ukrainian official told us. The military could get as many Starlink terminals as it needed through foreign donors and the commercial market. It could attach them to drones and launch them at the Russians without thinking twice about the cost. Starshield, by contrast, is far more expensive and only available in small batches through official government channels.

This spring, the U.S. military faced a similar dilemma in the Middle East. According to a Reuters report that cited Pentagon documents, U.S. forces used Starshield to pilot their drones for strikes against Iran. When SpaceX found out, it raised the price for Starshield service in that region from roughly $5,000 per terminal per month to $25,000. The Pentagon agreed to pay.

In Ukraine, Musk could be attempting a similar upsell. By enforcing the ban on military use of Starlink, he could oblige the Ukrainian military and its foreign allies to pay much more for Starshield. Musk’s explanation for the outages this month suggest he would be fine with that approach, even though it could allow the war to continue. “Using Starlink, a civilian commercial service, for offensive drone strikes to kill people has never been allowed, nor should it be,” he wrote on X on Saturday. “That loophole was closed last week.”

The statement confused a lot of Starlink clients in Ukraine. For military users, the loophole still appears to be open and the service operational. Ukraine’s defense minister announced at the end of last week that Starlink service had returned to normal in the war zone. Two military officers told us that drones equipped with Starlink terminals have resumed their flights, including strikes on Russian forces. They realize, of course, that Musk could ground them again whenever he wants, and the next outage could last much longer—as the memo from People’s Starlink forewarned.

“We have one very serious weak spot, and that’s our dependence on Starlink,” Denys Shtilerman, one of Ukraine’s most prolific drone developers, told us. “Next year we’ll address it,” he said. “Before that, America will have enormous leverage, the ability to blackmail us.”

Developing a Starlink alternative could take much longer than a year, and it would be unlikely to succeed without Musk’s help. Roughly 90 percent of all the mass delivered into orbit travels on SpaceX rockets. Even Europe’s main competitor to Starlink, a French-British project known as the OneWeb network, relies on SpaceX to launch its satellites. Last month, the parent company of OneWeb announced plans to spend a billion euros to procure 229 additional satellites by 2034. That would bring its total to around 1,000—a fraction the size of the Starlink network, which includes more than 11,000 satellites, the largest constellation by far.

[Read: The new subterranean front]

With the recent disruptions in Ukraine, Musk showed that he can cut off the service any time he wants. The memo from People’s Starlink described the several ways he has to do that. Stepanets, its author, noted that Musk could start charging more for the use of Starshield antennas, forcing the U.S. government to pay up or cancel the service.

In the most extreme case, the company could block Ukraine’s access entirely. Musk’s statements appear to countenance that. But Stepanets noted that such a move could blow up in Musk’s face. “Radical blackouts and humanitarian catastrophes make for a very bad public image,” he wrote in the memo. They would also not do much to help SpaceX’s profit margins or its stock price. Such considerations could restrain Musk’s urge to abandon Ukraine. But, either way, it will be his choice to make.

Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer contributed reporting.

The shortest flight path from Russia to the United States would take an enemy bomber over the North Pole and across Canadian airspace. During the Cold War, that simple fact was the impetus for the creation of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, which forged an integrated radar network across the two countries, effectively treating North American airspace as a single defensive zone.

Today, there’s less concern about a Russian barrage landing on U.S. soil, but NORAD remains relevant. Russian bombers still fly near Alaska and the Canadian Arctic. China’s expanding nuclear arsenal poses its own threat. Other airborne objects require vigilance, a lesson underscored by the mysterious flight path, in 2023, of a Chinese spy balloon, which NORAD shot down. This should matter to President Trump, who has identified the Western Hemisphere as a security priority. He even has a name for his approach: the “Donroe Doctrine.”

But all is not well at NORAD, the world’s only binational military command, headquartered at the Peterson Space Force Base in Colorado Springs. NORAD, which was founded in 1958, now demonstrates how the president’s disdain for U.S. allies risks undermining the military cooperation that has kept the United States safe for decades.

Positions at NORAD and other integrated combatant commands in the United States used to be plum posts for ambitious Canadian military officers, giving them a chance to coordinate with Americans on intelligence, air and missile defense, and joint operations. That’s changing. U.S. and Canadian officials told me that Canada has lately struggled to find senior officers willing to take the jobs, a problem acute enough that Canadian officers have shared their concerns with counterparts in Colorado Springs, Ottawa, and Washington. The reasons are threefold, according to current and former officials who described the dynamic to me on the condition of anonymity in order to address a sensitive subject. Although the influence and sophistication of the U.S. military once made the postings desirable to ambitious officers, some now fear that time in the United States might hurt their chances for future promotions if relations spiral further out of control. They also see diminishing returns from a posting in which they’re likely to have their access curtailed as a byproduct of political tensions. And they face resistance from their families, who worry that anti-Canadian sentiment whipped up by Trump might make the country inhospitable, even temporarily.

Canadian officers considering U.S.-based posts don’t believe that they’ll be treated as equals, according to several who spoke with me. While the Trump administration has bullied and threatened numerous allies, these officers perceive particular hostility toward Canada—in part because of the vehemence of the trade dispute, and in part because Prime Minister Mark Carney has been willing, at times, to stand up to Trump. “If you’re a two-star general in Canada, and you’ve got maybe one or two extremely important jobs left in your career, will you use one of them to take up a position in the States, where you might be underemployed, with little access and little meaningful work to show for it?” one Canadian officer asked.

[Read: Trump is learning that his bullying has consequences]

Some of the officials I spoke with noted that strained relations had not yet caused a tactical breakdown—no one had taken their eye off radar scopes or infrared cameras. And that’s what a NORAD spokesperson emphasized in response to my questions, issuing a statement saying that high-level Canadian roles at the binational command “remain fully staffed and highly regarded as career-enhancing opportunities, with Canadian personnel and their families fully integrated and operating with the systemic access required to execute binational defense operations for the homelands.”

The true impact of Canadian reluctance to serve in the United States may become manifest only in a crisis. In addition to the essential national-security functions performed by NORAD, the command also fosters camaraderie between the ranks of the two militaries. That’s vital if the U.S. military should ever need to project force to the north, including by moving personnel across Canada. Several of the people I spoke with raised the prospect of a conflict with China, which would quickly threaten Alaska, a crucial strategic hub. Moving U.S. forces to the noncontiguous state would depend on Canadian cooperation. In such a situation, Washington would want Canadian commanders who have served in the United States, so that American officers aren’t building new partnerships but are depending on people they’ve known for years. Canadian generals who’ve passed on postings in the United States because of friction between the two countries are much less likely to be sympathetic.

Since he returned to power last year, Trump has alienated longtime allies while praising rogue states such as North Korea. He has called Germany a “broken country” and said that French President Emmanuel Macron “always gets it wrong.” As a group, European leaders earned the epithet “weak.” He has imposed steep tariffs on their countries and threatened a foundation of Western security by raising doubts about U.S. fidelity to Article 5 of the NATO charter—that an attack on one is an attack on all.

Still, when I speak with senior officers in various allied countries—even Denmark, where the armed forces prepared for a possible U.S. invasion of Greenland earlier this year—they maintain that military-to-military cooperation continues despite political disagreements. Canada may be the first place where that is cracking. “The day-to-day relationship has deteriorated,” David Perry, an Ottawa-based defense analyst, told me. “There’s been a tangible change in the way the two countries interact on defense and security.”

That Washington is now choosing to alienate its northern neighbor is ironic because Canada, like other NATO members, is in the process of investing in the type of hard power that will make it an even more useful ally. When I met with Canada’s defense minister, David McGuinty, in February, the government had just released its first defense–industrial strategy, a plan to get weapons faster and—given geopolitical strife—to get more of them from Canadian suppliers. “Obviously continuing to work with the U.S.,” McGuinty said, “but now much more expansively looking to diversify.”

Earlier this year, the Canadian government promised to review whether to move forward with a full order of F-35 stealth fighters, which are produced by Lockheed Martin. This month, the government paused its acquisition of U.S.-made Black Hawk helicopters because of trade and diplomatic friction with Washington, according to CBC News and Radio-Canada. Canada is spending billions to upgrade radars, sensors, and other systems. Its participation in Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” would extend and strengthen the defensive shield, with the potential to protect both countries. But it’s hard to put much faith in protection from a bully. “Trust is easy to lose and hard to build,” Christopher Sands, the director of the Center for U.S.-Canada Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, told me.

The current rancor is entirely different from past trade disputes, which have often been combative—“like a courtroom drama,” Sands said. But the fighting once stayed out of public view, managed by low-profile diplomats. Now the public is in the audience and can’t look away from the president’s antics, which have “poisoned people-to-people relations.” The armed forces couldn’t remain immune forever.

An executive order on Trump’s first day back in office, in January 2025, made Canadian officers wonder whether the U.S. military might be used against them. The order assigned U.S. Northern Command, which shares NORAD’s Colorado headquarters, to the mission to “seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States.” It did not specify the southern border, causing Canadian officials in Colorado to ask their counterparts, as relations worsened over time: Are you planning to militarize the northern border, one of the world’s longest undefended and peaceful frontiers? U.S. officials tried to reassure them that any action would be cooperative.

But the guarantee of cooperation became difficult to sustain. Defending new tariffs imposed on Canada in February 2025, Trump wrote on social media that “Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country” without U.S. support. “Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State.” Early on, references to Canadian statehood had elicited laughs during staff meetings at NORAD. But the mood soon changed. In April, Trump rebuffed the suggestion that his talk of annexation was just bluster. “I’m really not trolling,” he said in an interview with Time.

By the end of the year, jokes within the binational command about the 51st state were met with silence or curt rebuttals. Attitudes had shifted dramatically. An Angus Reid Institute poll found that almost half of Canadians said that their government should view the United States as an “enemy” or “potential threat,” while only 27 percent called Washington a friend and ally. Canadian officers serving in the United States divulged to colleagues that their families didn’t want to visit them over the holidays, because they were afraid of crossing the border or encountering animosity in American communities. In addition to the joint command in Colorado Springs, Canadian generals have served as deputy commanders of U.S. Army corps in North Carolina, Texas, and Washington State.  

In early 2026, Carney named the dynamic generated by Trump’s hostility to American allies. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he said, calling on the world’s middle powers to band together to resist bullying and defend international institutions. (Later, in an interview with The New York Times, Carney said that it would have been “irresponsible” not to take into consideration the possibility that Trump might use force against Canada.)

[Watch: How did Trump’s trade fight with Canada go so sideways?]

The president’s insults might have been dismissed as a rhetorical feint—a way to demand better trading terms or shake loose more military spending—but the scorn for Canada was echoed by senior Pentagon leaders. In May, Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, used social media to complain about Canada’s military readiness and announce that the Trump administration was pausing its participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defense, a bilateral advisory body to coordinate security policy. “A strong Canada that prioritizes hard power over rhetoric benefits us all,” Colby wrote. “Unfortunately, Canada has failed to make credible progress on its defense commitments.” The board hadn’t met since 2024, so the move was mostly symbolic. But Colby’s withering review prompted nervous questions inside NORAD: Who is this guy, and how much power does he have?

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s approach was even less subtle. In August, he posted a photo of two young female Canadian cadets. Their physical appearance seemed not to impress him; he captioned the photo “this is real.” The post stunned Canadians for its crassness and unprofessionalism. Wayne Eyre, who served as chief of Canada’s defense staff from 2021 to 2024, told me that he found Hegseth’s intervention “highly insulting.” It was followed, the next month, by a cartoon image that Trump circulated on his Truth Social feed of him beating Carney with a hockey stick—“unimaginable conduct by the president of the United States, even in our most dystopian imagination,” as one Canadian official put it to me. U.S. military leaders at NORAD have tried to put on a brave face, reporting to visitors that binational cooperation is continuing unimpeded. But away from the spotlight, Canadian officers will acknowledge the strain, current and former officials told me.  

Eyre warned that cooperation of the kind that he helped oversee is more vulnerable than it might appear. “It’s sad, disappointing, and disturbing to see that deep relationship come under attack,” he said. “In my view, it’s a case of the U.S. undergoing self-harm by discarding and calling into question its competitive advantage, which is this system of alliances.”

Most of what the public knows about NORAD comes from its Santa Tracker, a lighthearted simulation of Santa Claus’s journey around the world on Christmas Eve. That’s because the command’s real business—guarding the skies—is mostly invisible. That is, until it stops working.