Comment by Mikhail_Edoshin

I am not an expert, so I'm retelling what I myself read.

A Starlink terminal has a detail that reports its location. There is a restriction on location, so if a terminal reports a restricted location, it gets blocked. A terminal may get blocked either because it actually got off the territory or if it the GPS signal was somehow distorted. So all terminals that go into Ukraine are hacked: they get a chip that reports a fixed location. This allows both to fight the distortions and to ignore the restrictions. (For some time this hack allowed use of Starlink on either side; then a white list of terminals came into effect.)

Ukraine never used (maybe didn't have access to) neither the military subsystem, nor the high-speed tariffs (which are way more expensive). The tariffs they use limit the moving speed of a terminal to 100 mph (160 kmph). For some time the limit was not enforced so drones just flew at any speed.

Around the end of 2025 the limit started to get enforced. But initially the technology relied on the data of a GPS chip. Since the terminal was hacked, the GPS chip reported the same data and thus appeared static. The enforcement thus did not work for these terminals. So although the limit was always there and has been technically enforced for a good part of a year everything was quiet as things simply continued to work as they always did.

But it is possible to detect the hack if one checks how frequently a terminal changes the satellite it connects to. This improvement was made recently and rendered the hack unusable on high-speed targets. This is the point we are at.