Ukraine's Control Over Starlink Internet Remains Unclear

The working family in Ukraine will notice this in the silence of a telephone: the call home that comes on a Sunday, or does not, from a son whose unit depends on a dish the size of a pot lid. That is where the analysis begins. It does not begin in Washington, nor at Mr Musk’s elbow, nor in any capital where they will argue the matter over a good dinner. It begins in a kitchen where a woman has set her phone face-up beside the bread and does not touch it, in case touching it makes it stay dark.

Now hear what the great men say. The service has “limits.” Access is “managed.” Control is “contested.” I have read these words twice over to find a single man inside them, and there is none. Put them into plain English and they say this: the soldiers of Ukraine are talking to each other, and to their mothers, through a wire that someone can cut, and nobody will tell them who holds the knife. US officials give one account of who controls the thing. Mr Musk gives another. President Zelensky must plan a war on top of both.

I knew a tenant once, in my farming days, who wished to know who could turn him off his land. He asked the steward, and the steward said it was the squire’s business. He asked the squire, and the squire said the lawyers had it. He asked the lawyers, and they sent him a bill. He never got an answer, and the reason was not that nobody knew. It was that an answer would have made somebody answerable. A man who names himself the owner of the switch must also own the dark that follows when he throws it. So long as there are two stories, every failure has an alibi and every outage an orphan. I do not say, for I cannot know, that either Mr Musk or the officials want it so. It may be honest muddle: a private firm and a public government each believing the other holds the rope, as two men on a ladder each believe the other is steadying it. But whether it is a trick or a muddle, the man at the foot of the ladder falls the same way, and the woman at the table waits the same length of time.

Let me give the other side its strongest form, for it has one. It goes like this. When the guns first came, no government on earth could have strung a net of talk over a whole nation in weeks. A private man with rockets did, and the soldiers of Ukraine are alive today who would not be otherwise. Better a gift with strings than no gift. And as for the doubt over who controls it, why, doubt is a weapon too; let the enemy wonder.

I grant the gift, and I grant the speed. But speed in the giving is not safety in the keeping. A loaf handed over the hedge in a famine is a mercy; a village that must eat from that hedge every day, never knowing whose hand is on the other side of it, is not fed. It is kept. And as for the enemy wondering, I will believe it when I see it. The enemy has its own wires. It is the Ukrainian officer, deciding whether to send men forward on the promise that they will be able to call back, who must wonder. Doubt kept in the enemy’s camp is a weapon. Doubt kept in your own is a leak in the powder store.

There is a thing here worth laughing at, if one has the stomach. Two parties, each of which would gladly take the credit when the dishes work, have each found a way to point at the other when they do not. That is not a quarrel. That is a partnership, of the oldest kind, between the man who says “I gave it” and the man who says “I allowed it,” with nobody left over to say “I am sorry it stopped.”

Who profits? I will not swear to any man’s motive, but I will say what the ledger shows. The man who never has to name himself never has to answer, and that is a profit, though it pays no dividend you could put in a purse. Who pays is plainer. The soldier in the trench pays, with his bearings and perhaps his life. His mother pays, by the hour.

She has cut the loaf now. She has put his slice aside, as she does, and she sits with her eyes on a small black glass that will not light, and in Texas and in Washington men are still explaining to one another whose fault the dark is.