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The biggest tell is that both Russia and the US panicked and immediately tried to prevent further attacks.

This is the first action that has had that effect. Taking out refineries for month after month produced grumbling. Taking out data centres produced an immediate response.

If the data centres didn't matter, Russia and the Trump people would have shrugged and said "Cute..." and/or repeated their standard rhetoric.

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Right? This is what prompted musk to take down Starlink, after everything else?

Look at what they do, not what they say.

I'm not sure I see the connection. Ukraine doesn't need Starlink up in order to be able to hit Russian data centers.

You mean Trump and star shield, right ?

The two networks are quite different despite SpaceX initially doing the MVP work for it.

They use both, heavily. An outage, like the one recently, severely affects them.

> In October 2026, George Barros of the Institute for the Study of War said the network had become "the backbone of military communications in Ukraine", used by land, naval and air forces, with both Starlink and Starshield (the US DOD service) used depending on the application.[60]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrainia...

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