In March 2025, messages appeared on the RuNet: the US Secretary of State announced his intention to meet with the head of SpaceX to talk with him about the possible disconnection of the Armed Forces of Ukraine from the satellite Internet system. We checked how reliable this news is.
March 4 Telegram channel «Two majors” (272,000 views at the time of writing this analysis) reported: “Today there is a lot of news that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised to discuss with Elon Musk in the coming days the shutdown of Starlink satellite Internet in Ukraine. We will observe, but the very fact of a public warning several days before the planned discussion [of the ceasefire] indicates, rather, an attempt at blackmail and pressure on the Ukrainian authorities. And don’t forget that Starlink for Ukraine is paid for by Poland, which concluded the contract, and European companies may well partially fill the resulting niche by providing their satellite communication services, albeit not on such a scale.” Channel "Voenkor Kitten“(90,000 views) clarified that Rubio’s words were allegedly reported by Western media, and added: “It’s too early to make any guesses about this. There has already been news about the systems being partially muted. In the end, they all turned out to be stuffing.”
Other Russian-language Telegram channels also wrote about the alleged statement of the head of the State Department, including Colonelcassad (263,000 views), "Uncle Slava"(198,000), Voblya (147,000), "Sheikh Tamir" (142,000), "Bocharik (yep, that same one)"(122,000), "Cat Kostyan"(117,000), "Mislivets Egor"(81,000), "Military observer"(57,000), Lomovka (52,000) and Mash Room (37,000). On air "Radio Sputnik" TV presenter Ruslan Ostashko spoke about Rubio's intention, and also reported about it "Public news service" There are similar publications on VKontakte (examples here And here).
The authors of some of the posts mentioned above supported their words with an 18-second video with the symbols of the American television channel CNN. In the video, Rubio communicates with presenter Kaitlan Collins, and their conversation is accompanied by Russian and English subtitles. The following dialogue took place between the characters in the video:
— What exactly do you want President Zelensky to apologize for?
- Well, let him apologize for turning all this into the fiasco that it turned out to be for him. In the next few days I will meet with Elon Musk and I swear that I will persuade him to turn off Starlink for the Ukrainian army. Then Zelensky will understand how much he really depends on us.
According to the search extradition on CNN's official website, Rubio gave Collins interview February 28, and a 10-minute version The TV channel published their conversations on YouTube on March 1. The interview was devoted to negotiations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Zelensky, who flew to Washington - the presidents of the two countries were supposed to conclude an agreement on US access to Ukrainian natural resources. But already a preliminary meeting with journalists in the Oval Office, which was attended by Rubio, ended in a fight, and the signing of documents was disrupted. According to transcript On the US State Department website, neither Musk nor Starlink were mentioned during that interview on CNN.
Collins initially quoted Zelensky as saying that he doesn't consider it necessary apologize to Trump for what happened, and asked about Rubio's opinion on this issue. The US Secretary of State said that he did not agree with the President of Ukraine, after which the presenter asked the interlocutor specify, for which exactly Zelensky should apologize. His entire answer sounded like this:
“Well, let him apologize for turning this whole thing into the fiasco it turned out to be for him. He didn't have to go there and confront him. Listen, everything has gone crazy. You were there. I think everything went off the rails when he said to the vice president, "Let me ask you a question. What kind of diplomacy are you talking about?" Well, this is very serious. In the sense that thousands of people were killed. Thousands! And he talks about all these terrible things that happened to prisoners of war and children. All this is true, all this is bad. That's what we're dealing with. This needs to end. We're trying to finish this. To put an end to this, we need to bring Russia to the negotiating table. And he understands this. Neither attacks on Putin (regardless of how one or another person feels about him), nor attempts to put the President [Trump] in a situation where he is forced to attack Putin, calling him different names, nor maximalist demands that Russia pay reparations, nor other proposals for negotiations in an aggressive form (and the President is a good negotiater, he has made deals all his life) - none of this will force people to come to the negotiating table. And then you begin to understand that perhaps Zelensky does not want a peace agreement. He says he wants to, but maybe he doesn't. And this active and open undermining of peace efforts is deeply disappointing to everyone who has been involved with him to date. And I think he should apologize for wasting our time on a meeting that shouldn’t have ended this way.”
On the same YouTube channel, CNN in the Shorts section “Verified” found almost a minute and a half excerpt from an interview with Rubio, in which the secretary of state answered the same question from the host. The design is similar to a viral video.
The first eight seconds of this CNN video completely coincide with the 18-second recording that went viral on Telegram, but there are differences begin from the place where there should have been a sentence about Musk and Starlink. So, on the version distributed on the RuNet at that moment, the video sequence changes to archival footage, and Rubio’s speech becomes voiceover.
“Verified” split the audio track of the viral video into two parts (the first eight and last ten seconds, respectively), and then analyzed them using the company’s AI detector Hive. It turned out that with almost 100% probability, the alleged words of the US Secretary of State about Musk and Starlink were generated by a neural network. At the same time, Hive analysis shows that at the beginning of the recording, the speech of a real person was just as likely to be heard. French fact checkers from the Les Observateurs project of the France 24 television channel used the Hiya audio fake detector and came to the same conclusions.
The earliest post with a viral video that “Verified” was able to track came from the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Odessa for victory!"(7300 views), where the video was published on March 4 at 12:25 Moscow time. This channel is often appears in our analyzes as the primary source of anti-Ukrainian fakes.
In addition, as the fact-checking project noted StopFake, on the same day, a screenshot allegedly taken on the CNN website appeared on the RuNet, in which only the headline, photograph and the beginning of the news article were visible. “CNN: Starlink rolling blackouts. Ukrainian military units record regular Starlink outages along the entire front line after Zelensky’s visit to the White House,” the Telegram channel translated the English text “Cat Kostyan"(84,000 views). However, these messages were distributed much worse on the RuNet: according to TGStat, less than 50 similar posts appeared on Telegram, with a total of just over 150,000 views. For example, the channels “Avdeevka.ru"(9300 views), "Gagauz Republic" (9000) and "Bear"(8800).
In fact, there is no material with the title "Starlink rolling blackouts" on the website American TV channel. “Verified” also found no traces of such a note on CNN’s social networks and its reprints or mentions in other authoritative publications. And the earliest appearance of a screenshot that we were able to track took place on March 4 at 14:55 in the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Kryminforum 🇿 🇴 🇻"(13,000 views). Almost half an hour later, a similar post appeared in the above-mentioned channel “Odessa for victory!"(5800 views).
Earlier media reported, that approximately 42,000 Starlink terminals are used on the territory of Ukraine, about half of which are financed by Poland. February 22, Reuters citing its own sources reportedthat the United States may disconnect Ukraine from the Starlink system if Kyiv and Washington do not sign an agreement on mineral resources. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, in turn, accused agency in a lie and stated that in terms of the level of misinformation it is surpassed only by the Associated Press (in the post the billionaire gave a distorted name - Associated Propaganda). In early March, Politico wrote that the E.U. is considering the ability to replace Starlink with alternative satellite systems from European companies.
March 9 on his social network X Musk called impose sanctions against ten of the richest Ukrainian oligarchs. In response to subsequent accusations of a pro-Kremlin position, the head of SpaceX wrote: “I literally challenged Putin to a real one-on-one fight for Ukraine, and my Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line will collapse if I turn it off.” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski responded to these words by reminded: “Starlink for Ukraine is paid for by the Polish Ministry of Digitalization and costs about $50 million per year. If SpaceX turns out to be an unreliable provider, we will be forced to look for other suppliers." In turn, the words of the Polish minister commented Rubio, thereby once again indirectly denying the authenticity of the viral video: “[You] are just making things up. No one threatened to cut Ukraine off from Starlink. And say thank you, because without Starlink, Ukraine would have lost this war long ago, and the Russians would now be on the border with Poland.” Musk named Sikorsky as a “little man” and called on him to remain silent, adding: “You are paying only a small part of the cost. And there is no replacement for Starlink.” Later billionaire wrote: “Let me be very clear: no matter how much I disagree with Ukraine’s policies, Starlink will never turn off its terminals. I was simply pointing out the fact that without Starlink, Ukrainian communication lines would collapse, since the Russians could jam all other communications! We will never do this or use this as a bargaining chip.”
Thus, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not promise to discuss with Elon Musk in the near future the possibility of disconnecting the APU from the Starlink system. Such messages are based on only one video, which first appeared on pro-Kremlin resources and was edited using neural networks.
Cover photo: screenshot of @CNN video (YouTube)
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