The revelations that Ukrainian naval operations were blocked by a lack of support from Elon Musk’s Starlink system cast light on to his complex relationship with Russia and Ukraine, but it is an area that deserves more light still, for Starlink’s parent, SpaceX, is far from the only technology company playing a vital role in Ukraine’s resistance against the Russian invasion. Household names such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others have also been essential to the defense of Ukraine.
The key role of technology companies — and the people working for and with them — in this war raises new questions about the status of private industry and civilians in wartime. Private companies are playing major roles in cyber, telecommunications, national resilience and more — but, just like SpaceX, none of them have an absolute duty to do so. Simply put, companies are providing capabilities that are vital to Ukraine’s national survival because they choose to, not because they are beholden to any of the states involved in the conflict.
Support from Amazon and its cloud services was crucial in evacuating Ukrainian government data before the invasion. Information technology companies such as Microsoft and ESET have been crucial to the cyberprotection of Ukrainian government and civilian networks against Russian attacks.
Google is providing both support services for Ukrainian government functions and protection for government Web sites and embassies worldwide. All of these companies — and a mass of smaller private sector and civil society organizations — have provided their services either pro bono or are funded by Western governments backing Ukraine.
The reason why none of these have hit the headlines in the same way as Starlink is not just because their support is provided quietly in the background, it is also because, unlike Starlink, all of these companies have made a clear choice as to which side they are on. They concluded that their own values, and their duty to their other customers, mean that they must back Ukraine.
Microsoft president Brad Smith said that the process of getting involved in geopolitics was “unusual and even uncomfortable, but became indispensable for the protection of our customers.”
The case of Starlink highlights the vulnerabilities that come with dependence on this kind of goodwill. X and Starlink under Musk are the primary case study for major technology platforms that hold power without accountability. Their distinctive ownership structure means that Musk’s personal decisions can easily cause lives to be saved or lost.
Musk wrote on X that he did not allow the Ukrainian raid on Russian warships for fear of causing “a major act of war” — which will have come as little comfort to Ukrainians fighting for their lives against major acts of war committed daily by Russia — and the abortive naval raid on Sevastopol is not the first time Ukraine has depended on Starlink and been let down. Geofencing meant that advancing Ukrainian forces discovered in October last year that Starlink ceased to function when they entered newly liberated areas, depriving them of a critical communications capability at a vulnerable moment.
Starlink in February placed further restrictions on usage, saying the system should not be used for offensive purposes, such as providing communications for controlling drones carrying out attacks on Russian troops. This too was presented by Starlink as a response to an unanticipated use of the service — not just for communications, but for specifically enabling offensive operations.
In all these cases, there are vital lessons for any other conflict where a state might be dependent on the goodwill of private industry — a critical fighting capability can be hostage to a terms-of-service breach.
What is more, in a future, more ambiguous conflict, private companies’ loyalties could cross borders and they could find themselves offering services to both sides. In addition, their own commercial exposure could be a determining factor. Unlike X and SpaceX, decisionmakers in most corporations answer to boards and shareholders, which implies that in a future conflict involving, for instance, China, potential loss of business as a result of backing the other side could be decisive in determining a major technology company’s loyalties.
This has direct implications for the defense of Western societies. The capabilities of private sector security firms are an integral part of Western cyberdefense capability, and in particular the digital security of critical infrastructure has largely been entrusted to private industry, but the example of Ukraine has thrown open the question of where that industry’s loyalty might lie.
Starlink is an extreme example, both because of its unique prominence in Ukraine’s publicly visible war effort and because of its distinctive ownership and decisionmaking structure, but the issues it highlights need to be addressed across the board. Corporations including SpaceX have independently jumped in to help Ukraine, largely because they felt it was the right thing to do. Governments must make sure it is an easy decision for them to decide to jump in on the right side in future conflicts, too.
Keir Giles works with the Russia and Eurasia program of London-based think tank Chatham House and is the author of Russia’s War on Everybody.
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