Ukraine war briefing: Finland urges Elon Musk to expand Kyiv’s Starlink coverage over Russia

Finnish President Alexander Stubb has said he pleaded with SpaceX owner Elon Musk to expand Starlink satellite internet coverage for Ukraine so it can strike Russian ballistic missile launchers located inside ⁠Russian territory. Ukraine ⁠has an acute shortage ​of air defences to repel Russian ballistic missiles and Kyiv believes that turning on Starlink over Russian territory would help it target the launchers that fire the missiles. Musk switched on the Starlink satellite internet service over ‌Ukraine shortly after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. It has become the lifeblood of Ukraine’s battlefield communications and a tool for piloting drones, but it does not work over Russian territory.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has met with senior Wall Street executives on ​the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York, ⁠as Kyiv seeks to attract investments to help finance the country’s rebuilding efforts. The meeting focused mainly ⁠on areas such as helping Ukraine get through the winter and supporting its economy, the Ukrainian ⁠government said. Ukraine faces a brutal winter as stepped-up Russian strikes on ​its infrastructure and key ‌export industries deepen ‌the country’s budget crisis. The daily cost of the war ‌grew to about $190m this year. The meeting, attended by more than two dozen US companies, was facilitated by US banking giant Citigroup and the US chamber of commerce.

Russia could launch a limited military attack against a Nato country in the coming months, Danish intelligence said, in one of the starkest warnings yet by western security services. In a report published on Thursday, the Danish defence intelligence service warned of a “low but growing risk” that Russia could launch long-range strikes on Nato infrastructure supporting Ukraine, or carry out a limited incursion into a neighbouring country with a small number of troops, potentially operating without insignia. The report came hours after a fire at a Starlink satellite station in central Poland that local authorities described as an “act of sabotage”.

Nato is capable of handling sabotage and drone incidents in Europe and has good action plans in place to deal with them, the alliance’s secretary general said after the warning from Danish intelligence. Secretary-general Mark Rutte said he believes the rising number of hybrid incidents in Nato countries shows that Russian President Vladimir Putin is losing the war in Ukraine. He said that citizens of the 32 Nato countries can remain calm. “Putin is in a bad place,” Rutte said. “He is not winning the war in Ukraine.”

Russian drone and missile strikes on Kyiv and Ukraine’s north-east killed eight people on ⁠Thursday in attacks that included ⁠a maternity hospital and a ​farm, officials said. Two people died ⁠in the assault on Kyiv, Zelenskyy said. “As people were sleeping, flashes from explosions lit up the sky,” the president said on Telegram. Police said nine homes, a post office, ​warehouses and dozens of cars were also damaged in Kyiv. A separate ‌Russian attack on a vegetable storage ‌facility at a farm in a village of the north-eastern Kharkiv region killed six people and injured a further 12, prosecutors said.

⁠Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said Turkey ⁠had ⁠stepped up ​efforts to re-establish the Black ⁠Sea grain corridor. “We have now increased ⁠our efforts to ​re-establish ‌the grain corridor. ‌We are also ‌accelerating our diplomatic steps for this,” Erdogan told a group of Turkish journalists ‌in New York. Erdogan said ⁠he had discussed ​the ​issue again ​with Zelenskyy ‌and received ​a ​positive response.