A Starlink Slowdown in Ukraine?

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0:28From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Ukraine says its Starlink satellite data is slowing down and hamstringing the country's ability to defend itself from Vladimir Putin. Is the Trump administration once more trying to push Kiev into an ugly peace while putting little to no pressure on Putin? Meanwhile, NATO's top military commander unveils a plan to defend the European continent in the event of an attack from Putin. NATO's commander says in no uncertain terms, if attacked, the alliance will fight. Those are our subjects today on Potomac Watch. And I'm your host, Kate O'Dell.

1:08So joining me today to talk about Ukraine and NATO is two of my favorite colleagues, Matt Continetti, who is a columnist for our free expression newsletter, and Joe Sternberg, who is a columnist for our pages and also a member of the editorial board. Gentlemen, thanks to you both. Matt, start us off here. The The big story on Wednesday was that Ukraine on the battlefield had started noticing that its Starlink satellite data was slowing down. And Ukraine, of course, uses this service to manage its air defense and then to conduct some offensive strikes. Though, as far as we know, Ukraine does not use Starlink to strike inside Russia proper.

1:46So my opener question here is, this looks to me, paired with the diesel deal earlier this week to be a new round of attempts from the Trump administration to muscle Ukraine into a deal. So how do you read this Starlink interruption and what we know about it so far, Matt, and how it fits into a larger negotiation strategy from the Trump administration? Right. Well, what we know about the Starlink matter is, I'd say, relatively little. We know that Ukraine's experiencing connectivity issues for some of their weapons at high speeds, and that they believe that that's somehow goes back to Starlink itself.

2:26The president said that he has not ended intelligence sharing with Ukraine, which others had reported or speculated on. So it's a very murky situation, at least with regard to Starlink. We know that, of course, Elon Musk has kind of gone back and forth on his attitude toward the Ukraine war over time. And of course, Elon Musk is a close advisor to the president on, you know, every, it depends on which day of the week, I guess, when they're arguing or not, but they seem to be back in good graces these days. I think the larger picture here, Kate, is, as you said, Trump believes that the way to lower diesel prices is to pressure Ukraine.

3:10Now, Russia itself, according to the Institute for the Study of War, admits that the increase in diesel is not connected to the Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries. The Russians themselves blame the Strait of Hormuz for the increase in diesel fuel, but Trump thinks it is. And so we've seen weeks now of stepped up pressure. And also at the same time, an openness to dealing with Putin. And really, you can go back to the summer when a Russian economic minister attended the G20 summit in Asheville, North Carolina, under the auspices of Treasury Secretary Besant as an observer. And at that moment, people were kind of raising eyebrows saying, what's going on here?

4:00And out of that came the news that Putin would be invited to Florida for a summit at the end of the year. And so ever since the summer, Trump has tried to, I think, reestablish a relationship with Putin. And that has come at the expense of his relationship with Volodymyr Zelensky. I want to get back with Matt on the politics here. But Joe, staying with the substance of aiming for a peace in Ukraine, I mean, look, It would be great if the president could get a peace deal in Ukraine. And I think everyone accepts now that even an imperfect one might be worth it to stop the war. But the problem, of course, is that Putin won't agree even to a ceasefire, even to a temporary ceasefire on even some types of targets.

4:43And we've had multiple stillborn ceasefire attempts at this point. And Joe, this is starting to feel like a pattern where the Trump administration, you know, starts to do, they start turning the screws on Ukraine in various ways. They start making concessions to Putin, you know, some that Matt mentioned, but I remember too last year, remember there was a 28 point plan for peace in Ukraine that looked like a very bad document of capitulation. But then once it became clear that that wouldn't work very well and that Congress really wasn't going to tolerate it and that Putin himself might not even accept it, they backed off.

5:18And then eventually the Trump administration starts to focus on other things. And then they come back, but they try the same strategy again, which is just, you know, unilateral pressure on Ukraine and not putting any pressure on Putin. And so do you detect any change in the strategy here? Or how do you read, for instance, the diesel deal? You know, they seem to think that's a good negotiating chip for them. And I'm hoping you can unpack that logic for us. Kate, I mean, the problem is, if we're going to talk about whether there's a change in strategy here that's assuming that there was a strategy in the beginning that you can change.

5:50And I just, it's not clear to me that there has been. I mean, I take the point that President Trump enjoys negotiating and he thinks that the act of negotiating is a powerful diplomatic tool that he has often thought we have underused for whatever reason. But we're now in the situation where he keeps negotiating with himself over Ukraine precisely because he misunderstands what Vladimir Putin's interests are in this conflict. And Trump misunderstands the fact that what Putin wants here, you can't really negotiate on. There are fundamental U.S. interests and interests of our allies involved in not giving Putin the things that he cares most deeply about in Ukraine, namely control of Ukraine.

6:41And so you have to come up with some kind of policy that accounts for the fact that this is not a situation that's going to be amenable to negotiation. One of the things that I find vexing about this is that we often find ourselves in the situation where it's as if Trump is thrashing around looking for any little bit of leverage that he can find in the situation, whether it's diesel or some kind of pressure on Zelensky to get the Ukrainian side to negotiate with a partner that doesn't want to negotiate with them. We're doing all of this. And then you look at something like the Starlink story where part of the news here is basically how little the Ukrainians are asking of America there.

7:23What they want is access to this communication technology so that they can continue defending themselves. This is not an argument about whether the U.S. is going to withdraw boots that we have on the ground because we don't have any there. So we're in this perverse situation where essentially negotiating with ourselves right now. And in the course of doing that, we are refusing to do very simple, low-cost things that we could be continuing to do that would potentially offer big benefits for America's national interest and our allies. Yeah, Joe, I think that's a great point, especially on the battlefield reality.

8:02As I think some of our listeners now, the Ukraine war has been going on so long. voters have lost track of it maybe a little bit or have a dim sense that nobody is really winning, that Ukraine can't really regain the momentum or its territory. And so I think it's worth pointing out just how much military progress Ukraine has made in stabilizing the front lines. NATO's top military commander this week at a conference in Warsaw said that Ukraine's front lines largely had been stabilized and that they had done an impressive job doing that, particularly in 2026. And so the Institute for the Study of War, an organization that produces reports on the Ukraine war, was writing this week about actually there is a narrow window here where Ukraine has managed to regain some momentum.

8:44They've erased some of the territory that Russia has taken and that we have this potential opening now to try to have some leverage to get Putin to a negotiating table. And so I think that the timing here is also particularly regrettable. And Matt, you know, just ending on that, I mean, I think President Trump should probably consider that the one reason the Ukraine war hasn't become a political disaster for him is because the Ukrainians have been willing to keep fighting and hold the line there. And so it's hard not to detect in all of this a cynical kind of political ploy to say, you know, Ukraine's really causing all of our problems ahead of the election to try to change the subject from the Iran war.

9:26But I think Russia accommodation is also really unpopular with voters. And so I'm curious if you think, one, that that's what's going on here, that this is animated maybe less by than the substantive negotiations, but the midterms. And then whether that is really a strategy that's going to help him kind of blunt his liabilities around the Iran war. Well, I do believe the midterms have a role in this debate, and it's because of the price of fuel and specifically diesel fuel. And Trump has drawn this connection again, I think an overstated connection between the global increases in diesel and Ukraine's attacks on the Russian energy infrastructure.

10:08Interestingly, those attacks, of course, are targeting the energy infrastructure of the Russian war machine, whereas Russia's attacks on Ukraine's infrastructure are all civilian targets. And indeed, Russia's been, I think, purposely targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure as their main forces on the battle line have not advanced. In fact, no near zero gains, to quote the Institute for the Study of War once again, since March 2026. And that's like you said, just last week, we had this culmination of Operation Vivaldi in which Ukrainian forces actually reclaim territory from Russia. So Trump is worried about fuel prices.

10:50I also think we can't underestimate the personal dimension in this. Trump likes talking to Vladimir Putin. This is always the case. And he comes out of these phone calls essentially kind of talking like Putin probably talked to him. And so they had a recent phone call. The phone call was supposed to be about this lab leak in Siberia. And instead of hearing about what's going on with the lab leak, we heard a lot about how Zelensky is a problem, about how Zelensky needs to stop attacking Russia and how Zelensky needs to go. That was also part of Trump's rhetorical escalation in the past week. This is not good for Trump in any way.

11:31First of all, you mentioned electoral disaster. How many other electoral disasters can the man have? I mean, he has this extremely unpopular war in Iran. He has extremely unpopular economic policy. The Republicans are headed into a midterm election in less than three weeks that they are not favored to win, certainly in the House of Representatives. So turning the focus on Ukraine, I don't think accomplishes anything. And I'd also just add, this is a moment where you can really feel the loss of individuals. Because Trump operates just so much on a personal basis, what he thinks of the person on the other side of the table or on the other end of the phone, Lindsey Graham's death is a real blow to the efforts to put pressure on Russia and get some progress that way.

12:16We just had Trump sign the Lindsey Graham Sanctions Act. And here he has tools to put economic pressure on Russia, and he is not using them. And instead, he's putting this rhetorical pressure and potentially this type of intelligence pressure via Starlink on the Ukrainians. It's completely backward in my view. Well, you're right to point out that the practical electoral effect here may be reminding voters of something, another policy of his that they don't like very much, which is his negotiating strategy in Ukraine. Joe, picking up on Matt's point about the loss of individuals and that the institutions like Congress that could play a role in checking some of what Trump is up to here, we did see a letter from lawmakers telling him to abandon the diesel deal, but mostly from lawmakers like Tom Tillis, John Curtis, Republicans, not necessarily in the heart of the rank and file that Trump has to listen to when they start warning about something being a problem.

13:15And you do have behind the scenes lawmakers increasingly frustrated with the president's handling of Ukraine. But does Congress have any way to stop the diesel deal? Or is it exclusively just a backbone and will issue and not wanting to challenge the president on this? Well, I think that some of those Republicans who are grumbling privately are going to have to start doing that in public to create a degree of pressure on the president and to remind him that, what he is doing now with the diesel deal is not necessarily going to solve his underlying political problem on energy prices and also is not necessarily going to be popular on its own merits.

13:52Now, I can understand the resistance to the idea of poking the bear with only a few weeks to go before the election in a bad year for Republicans, for the ones who are hanging on. Many of them are expecting that if they do win, it's going to be by a narrow margin. I get it. But I think that after the election, there is going to have to be a moment where some of these Republicans in Congress who are still around are saying, what are we doing here? I mean, what is the point of passing this legislation at some political cost to themselves? because it always requires a certain amount of expenditure of political capital to get something like that over the finish line, and then to allow Trump in his mercurial fashion to just cut it off because he feels like it.

14:42So I think that part of the dynamic here, and we'll have to see how this plays out, is, you know, is Congress going to rediscover a sense of itself once Trump gets into this lame duck period after the midterm? And how invested will lawmakers feel in this legislation that they have just passed? I mean, you would hope that they would feel invested in it because, look, they passed it. They thought it was important enough to do that. Right. I mean, my two, I think, final cautionary notes on this topic is the first is that I think, Look, when President Biden started helping Ukraine, eventually over time, especially Republican voters did sour on that.

15:24But that's not because they didn't want to help Ukraine. My impression of the polling and the information behind it is really that the perception was that Joe Biden did not have a strategy, that he was giving Ukraine kind of enough weapons to hang on, but was afraid that the war might widen and nervous about escalation with Putin. And so that is what voters soured on under the Biden administration. And the Trump administration is, they're not directly providing the weapons. They've made Europe provide the weapons as a rigmarole. But I think Trump has long ago started risking entering the same territory.

15:56And the other quick point banging around in my mind is, too, about the winter of 2022 was the last time where it looked like Ukraine had as much battlefield leverage as they do now. And the Biden administration was just extremely slow to arm Ukraine for a potential counteroffensive. in the spring of 2023, provided way too few weapons and was reticent that Ukraine could learn new platforms. And the free world, and particularly Ukraine, is still paying for that mistake. And so the Starlink, I think, news has to be considered in that larger picture of that this is a window of opportunity for the United States and the free world to try to put more pressure on Russia.

16:37And it'd be a shame to miss another one the way that Biden did in 2022. We'll hold it there and take one quick break on Potomac Watch. Why can't we get AI to production? Our competitors are all ready. How do we keep data secure? When do we actually see ROI? All this talk about AI, but talk doesn't transform businesses. AWS AI cuts through the noise, making AI easier to securely deploy and scale. With ready-to-use agents and the broadest set of AI tools and services, you can build, buy, or partner your way. Stop overthinking. Start building. AWS AI is how. This is Matthew Hennessey, the editor of Free Expression.

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18:03Welcome back. Let's turn our attention over to a speech this week from the top NATO commander, General Grinkowicz. He is known in the Air Force for his call sign Grinch. So if you hear us referring to him as such, that is why. Let's take a quick listen to what the general had to say at a conference in Warsaw. Burden of escalation would rest squarely upon the aggressor. They and they alone would bear the full moral, political, and strategic weight of deciding whether to do so. And here, we must ensure the adversary also knows that we have the advantage that escalation will only worsen his position, both militarily and politically.

18:44And should an adversary threaten escalation by saber-rattling, or should one actually decide to escalate during conflict, it will not fracture our alliance. Instead, it will only bind us more tightly together. We should take comfort in our ability to deliver mass effects, and the implicit warning that we could match any enemy move up the escalation ladder. These same factors should also give pause to any adversary. Seeing an alliance united, strong, and ready, they should quickly realize the military calculus of escalation is too high. Joe, so the NATO commander gave an extended speech saying, don't mess with us.

19:23Don't confuse our defensive alliance with one that lacks resolve or the will to fight. In fact, he said, we will fight. I wonder if you'd talk about this speech first as the European audience.

19:37our allies in a very delicate moment where we're not sure what the president is up to in Ukraine, worried about the war widening and any number of other things that have the Europeans nervous. Okay. I think you're right to start out thinking about this in terms of the European audience, because I interpreted that as being a primary audience for this. This was not just directed at Vladimir Putin. I mean, let's be clear that Putin is still the main threat to NATO at the moment. You know, the problem that Europe has had, and this has really come into focus since the war in Ukraine started back in 2022, is that it had been about a generation to a generation and a half since the last time that they had had to think seriously about European security, NATO strategy, and how all of these different pieces of the puzzle would fit together.

20:26And if you think about it, it's remarkable that they made it that long without thinking about this because, you know, the Russian threat never went away. Even before the Ukraine war started in winter of 2022, you had a bunch of episodes up to and including that Russian chemical agent assassination in Salisbury, Britain, that ought to have called a lot of attention to the fact that NATO was going to have to adjust to various hybrid threats. Think seriously about how you would respond to some of these provocations from Russia. They're very far behind on that process right now. And what I heard when I listened to the general speech was an attempt to approach some of the particular concerns that always bubble up in Europe around these issues.

21:17So, for example, one thing that hobbled the German response to the Ukraine war for the first several years was really this panic that would bubble up within Germany at every hint that there might be some kind of escalation because they thought that the next step was going to be a nuclear war. So you've got to come up with some way of training both the European political class and the public to think about what are the different steps in a potential attack or escalation scenario. How are we going to reassure voters that actually it isn't either rollover or nuclear apocalypse, that there are actually a lot of very useful, important steps that the NATO alliance can take between those two points that will contribute to defense.

22:06So I think from that perspective, it was an important speech for them to hear this is an important thought process that Europe is going to have to continue going through. It's probably not helpful that Trump himself is so mercurial on some of these issues, but, you know, all the more reason then for Europe to be thinking about this. Matt, I was struck by, you know, the general laid out a pretty specific strategy of how the West would handle, say, a Russian invasion of the Baltics, though he did not name Russia or kind of talk about the specific geography of any such attack. And he described it as blunt the invasion and break it and kind of roughly saying, you know, we'll try to stop it its tracks.

22:47We'll continue to use our mix of precision weapons and autonomous weapons to keep it from going forward. And then break, if it keeps going, and if Putin were to double down, we will hit everything that generates that force. It's just really striking, like Joe said, to hear kind of a return to what we commonly did in the Cold War, which was discuss how we would deal with such a contingency and also exercise it to show that we were ready to execute it. And so I I want to get your impressions of just, you know, the existence of this debate at all and then the merits of the strategy he's laying out.

23:20Well, I thought it was a remarkable speech, not just for its text and its delivery, but also the environment in which it was delivered. I mean, first, there's the American political environment and the messages that we heard from the Grinch are not the messages you hear from the White House or the Pentagon, which has been very interested in removing U.S. forces from Europe, or at least redeploying them from our legacy bases to other bases inside Europe. And of course, as we've just been discussing, it's not what you would hear from President Trump either. And then there's the geopolitical context.

23:57The speech was delivered amidst a rising hybrid war between Russia and the West. That war is conducted on the cyber front with numerous cyber attacks. We've seen rising numbers of Russian drones penetrate NATO airspace. And just today on Wednesday, October 14th, as we're recording this, we had a report in our paper about recent drone attacks on ships transiting NATO waters. And of course, the implication is that those are Russian drones as well. So Putin, as he's reached an impasse on the battlefield in Ukraine has essentially lashed out in two directions. The first, as I remarked, is against the Ukrainian civilian population.

24:40You know, I would just tell the Germans, you don't need a nuclear bomb to make Ukraine uninhabitable. And that's what Vladimir Putin is trying to do. He's trying to make Ukraine uninhabitable. And of course, millions of Ukrainians have already left Ukraine. And if he's successful in this coming winter in destroying all of their supplies of heat, destroying all their potable water, randomly targeting hospitals and schools, It's the equivalent to the nuclear bomb and making that country unlivable. So he's done that on one hand. And on the other hand, he is increasing the pressure on NATO. He's testing NATO, typical Russian probing techniques, trying to see how far they can go.

25:15And to date, he's met almost no resistance. And that's why I think the general speech was important, is he was saying, look, there is a point at which we will respond. And I hope we never get to that point. Stay with us. We've got to take one quick break. Why can't we get AI to production? Our competitors are already... How do we keep data secure? When do we actually see ROI? All this talk about AI. But talk doesn't transform businesses. AWS AI cuts through the noise. Making AI easier to securely deploy and scale. With ready-to-use agents and the broadest set of AI tools and services, you can build, buy, or partner your way.

25:53Stop overthinking. Start building. AWS AI is how. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast.

26:11From the Opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back. I'm chatting with my colleagues, Matt Cottonetti and Joe Sternberg, about Ukraine. I think you're right to zero in, too, that the front lines of this current contest is Ukraine. And yes, he's testing NATO. But I mean, the reason why we want to stop him in Ukraine, one of them is so that Western, including American sailors and soldiers, are never fighting Putin on European territory. Matt, I wanted to get your thoughts. Last question here today and feel free to take it briefly. But the one thing that we noted in today's editorial and caught my attention in this speech was the general specifically said that NATO would not try to inflict a, quote, strategic defeat on Russia in the event of such a confrontation.

26:58And look, obviously, NATO would want to limit escalation in any sort of direct confrontation with Vladimir Putin. Nobody would want to see nuclear escalation here. Nobody's suggesting that NATO march on Moscow. But it is striking to me that we are taking off the table, facts unseen, a strategic defeat for Putin that he should have to ponder before he invades a nuclear alliance with a lot of military and economic power that outweighs his. Help us think about that line. And how does it compare even maybe to what we did in the Cold War, if that's useful? Well, I do think it's related to the nuclear brinkmanship you mentioned.

27:36And that is the understanding in D.C. is that if Putin felt directly threatened, that would be a case where he would consider using a tactical nuclear weapon on the battlefield. And so perhaps that was a way of calming the Russians or kind of putting them off of that option. But it's also a reflection of just how America is dealing with the conflicts in which we're embroiled these days. We telegraph a lot. I mean, our president, of course, telegraphs everything. He said no attack against Iran until after the election. He says amidst these Houthi militia attacks on civilian targets in Saudi Arabia.

28:13Well, Houthis, you might be sorry. You know, we don't know what that means or what he's going to do. And here's the same thing is we're foreclosing this option. And we also know, of course, that already there was an attempt to remove Putin from power earlier on in the war, that Progrosian pooched, which failed and Progrosian wound up in an airplane accident, as Putin's enemies often do. And we can fully expect that if Putin did meet the type of pressure I'm describing, whether it's even harsher economic pain that's already been imposed on Russia, mainly by the Ukrainians, or because he makes the second catastrophic error of attacking a NATO country, his days would be numbered.

28:55I mean, I just want to add in here that there is also a domestic political component to a lot of this in Europe right now. Lest we forget, France is going to have a presidential election next year, whether we want them to or not. And right now, it looks like the likely winner of that would be Marine Le Pen and the insurgent right national rally. Whatever you want to say about that party and the ideological journey that they have been on in these recent years, They are potentially not as hard line on Russia as other parties in French politics would be. And that would also be true if the French left is successful in that election.

29:35And then across the Rhine in Germany, which is the other major European country that you have to think about here, at the moment, the most popular party is this insurgent right alternative for Germany, your AFD party. also notoriously sympathetic to Putin and Russia in general. And so my interpretation of some of this speaking about not inflicting too much of a strategic loss on Putin in this speech that we've been discussing, I do think there's going to have to be an element to this NATO strategizing of not making promises that we're unlikely to be able to keep and also not making threats that are going to be unlikely politically to be able to follow through on.

30:16And I think the domestic politics in Europe are going to come into that discussion quite a lot over the next couple of years. Well, thanks, Joe and Matt. That's all for today on Potomac Watch. We'll be back tomorrow. This episode is brought to you by Hard Lessons, a podcast from Morgan Stanley. Some investing lessons only become clear after you see how a call plays out. On Hard Lessons, iconic investors sit down with Morgan Stanley leaders to go behind the scenes on the critical moments, both successes and setbacks, that shaped who they are today. Watch or listen to Hard Lessons wherever you get your podcasts.