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He's only doing it now because his name got out on the Epstein emails. The russians lost their kompromat on him.

It is my impression that deep strike drones previously flew pre-programmed (attempting to locate the target using satnav, with some fancy versions using ground scanning lidar or machine vision).

The problem of deep strike drones becoming remote-controlled seems recent, and Ukraine has been experiencing an increasing frequency of those since autumn. They've been attacking moving targets. One recently hit a locomotive moving on a railway, the other hit a bus full of miners.

I don't know the background - was Starlink responsive or unresponsive, or did Ukrainians wait for a statistical curve of adoption to present itself and become certain, before asking Starlink to pull the rug.

What is clear that Ukraine has worked out a way of registering and whitelisting their own Starlink terminals, and hasn't yet fully completed the process. Some Ukrainian units relying on small donors' Starlink dishes are still working to get theirs whitelisted. However, this likely can't be used to determine if Starlink was responsive to requests, as Ukraine would likely not start implementing a whitelist before getting a positive reply from Starlink - so the process becomes rushed for natural reasons.

Russians have been observed cursing Musk in colorful ways. In several places, offensive operations have temporarily stopped because units had become over-reliant on Starlink, and considered Musk "their own guy".

Next step: war of the mesh networks.

Serhii Beskrestnov (radio amateur and now adviser to the Ukrainian defense ministry) has already pointed out that Russian drones are increasingly often providing connectivity to those that fly before them (expensive Chinese frequency hopping mesh radios have been recovered). While this dulls the edge of the swarm (the swarm has to be gradual, air defense will get time to reload) it requires Ukrainians to rework their jamming efforts and try to shoot down the relay nodes (which may be identifiable using signals intelligence). And of course, ideally, someone should talk to the Chinese companies, maybe offering to buy all the fancy mesh radios they make.

He's truly human garbage.

“Illicit” is definitely the wrong word.

putin likely had krompromat on him.

What replacement services are available? The American service actually works. Making your own would cost an order of magnitude more (as your contractors mysteriously "lose" half the money and bill the defence ministry 10 million roubles for "pens") and a decade of your time.

Maybe they could hire Chinese firms to do it but I think China has a tendency to keep its military technology to itself.

Well most militaries do that lol

A big part of russian strategy (both military and political) is turning the wests own tools against it. Its how they manage to have such an outsized degree of political reach despite having the economy of a middle european power.

Because Putin has been ransacking the country for decades and they relied on stolen tech and decades old military equipment to get by.

Of course one can just not have internet also....

That's because it didn't. Likely used it for r&r rather than critical infrastructure.

He probably didn't do it but the workers that work at starlink