The Starlink story today is about a number: 100 mph. Overnight, SpaceX capped the speed at which a terminal will stay connected, and Ukraine’s adviser Serhiy Beskrestnov says nobody told Kyiv. Some missions were disrupted, he says, and he doesn’t think the timing is a coincidence. SpaceX hasn’t commented.

I can’t tell you whether it’s political. It may be a routine technical limit that landed badly, and I’d be wary of anyone who claims to know either way. What I can say is that the argument is only possible because the setting lives in one company’s hands. A country’s drone war, its air defence, its ability to hit a refinery or a bridge, all of it passes through a parameter that a private firm can change between midnight and breakfast, with no treaty or vote involved.

It lands in a strange week for infrastructure. Poland just blamed Russia for the fire at a Starlink station. Estonia blamed Moscow for an arson at a drone-vehicle maker. And in a German courtroom, a Ukrainian man is on trial for blowing up Nord Stream, four years on. The pipelines were the old kind of strategic asset: steel, physical, hard to quietly adjust. The new kind is a software setting, which is cheaper to attack and much easier to deny having touched.

The detail I keep turning over is the same adviser who complained about it also said, in effect, that he found out by watching things stop working. That’s how most people learn what they depended on.

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