Hours after Ukrainian officials discovered a restriction on Starlink terminals that disrupted the country’s military operations, SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk sought to shift responsibility away from his company.

“Starshield systems are owned and controlled by the US government. Any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS,” the billionaire posted to his social media platform X, adding that Starlink is owned and controlled by SpaceX.

Musk’s statement, however, seemed to ignite more questions than answers, as there are multiple versions of the Starshield offering.

Starshield is a militarized version of Starlink that has become a key component of Ukraine’s war in Russia. While the US government does have a Starshield network that it owns and operates, SpaceX also offers Starshield as a military-grade communications service that relies on the company’s own Starlink network.

Musk’s comments, landing amid an intensifying public backlash over the situation in Ukraine, seem to refer to Starshield only as the US government-owned hardware. His statements also appear to conflict with the account of a person familiar who told Bloomberg Wednesday that SpaceX limited terminal connections. The person asked to not be identified in order to discuss private decisions.

That uncertainty has given rise to questions as to whether the US government or SpaceX restricted access in Ukraine. While the system has since been restored, it remains unclear who made the call and why. The decision has ignited a firestorm over who controls access to the technology on the front lines of Ukraine, with Ukrainian officials placing the blame on both Musk and President Donald Trump’s administration.

Even the idea that SpaceX or Musk could hold that kind of power may give customers pause. The European Commission is looking to fast track approval for a satellite venture that could rival the capabilities of SpaceX’s Starlink network and lessen reliance on US capabilities, Bloomberg reported Thursday.

The White House has not commented on the issue, but Axios reported that a senior official in the Trump administration said that it wasn’t involved in the restriction, citing an unidentified person. Earlier this week, the White House separately denied that it stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine.

“We are helping them, and we are sharing intel. We want the war to end,” Trump said, adding that Washington was working with both Kyiv and Moscow to end the war, now in its fifth year.

SpaceX’s Starshield service provides secure communications to governments with higher levels of encryption but still relies on the company’s broader Starlink network.

Starlink is a satellite-based Internet service owned and operated by SpaceX that provides broadband connectivity from the company’s network of more than 11,000 satellites in low Earth orbit. The service has 12 millionrs and is SpaceX’s most profitable business unit.

The US government, along with some other allies, use the Starshield service. Separately, the Pentagon has bought its own militarized version of Starlink satellites, known as the Starshield network, which the US government uses for communications and intelligence for the National Reconnaissance Office. It is unclear whether the US government-owned network would be providing service to Ukraine.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine has used tens of thousands of Starlink terminals for frontline military communications and operations, including to pilot drones and target artillery fires. SpaceX has donated some terminals, while other countries, including Poland, the US and Germany have continued to fund Ukraine’s access to the technology.

On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy argued that the apparent decision to throttle access to SpaceX’s satellite technology had already led to civilian deaths because Ukrainian interceptors that rely on it could no longer knock down Russian drones as effectively. Six people were killed and 13 wounded in a Russian drone attack on a grocery store in the western city of Lutsk, close to the border with Poland, Zelenskyy said on Musk has a history of tampering with SpaceX technology in the region.

SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in 2023 that the company had limited the use of Starlink on Ukrainian drones and that the technology “was never meant to be weaponized.”A year earlier, Musk denied a request to activate Starlink near Crimea, a Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory, and reportedly ordered a shutdown of the service in another instance.

“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk wrote on X about the denied request.