Is There a Russian President in the White House?

In October 2026, Elon Musk throttled Ukraine’s Starlink while Trump cut a diesel deal with Putin. This is what those two weeks looked like to a father in Germany.

Anhelina was fourteen months old. Fourteen months!

On October 19, she was lying in her stroller in a park in Nova Vodolaha, in Ukraine's Kharkiv region. Then a Russian drone hit. Anhelina is dead. Her mother Inna, a teacher, is dead. An eleven-year-old girl is dead. Six people died because they spent an autumn afternoon in a park. Ukrainska Pravda reported it.

I saw the photo. I can't get it out of my head. I have two daughters. My youngest is three. Two years ago she lay in her stroller exactly like that – just as small, just as defenseless. I sat in front of my screen and almost cried. Then the anger came. It hasn't left.

First, it belongs to the man who sent that drone. Vladimir Putin is a war criminal – the International Criminal Court has had a warrant out for him since 2023 for the deportation of Ukrainian children. He started this war. Night after night, for almost five years, he has bombed apartment blocks, power grids, hospitals and playgrounds. Without Putin, not one of these people would be dead.

But I expect nothing from Putin. Nobody in their right mind does. What tears me apart is something else: in those very same days, the people who were supposed to stand with Ukraine stabbed it in the back. Not in Moscow. In Washington. And in Texas.

I'm German. I'm not the one voting on November 3. But I'm writing this in English, because you are. And I want you to know what this looked like from the outside.

What came before: Russia's servers burn

To understand what happened, you have to start one day earlier than most reports do.

On the night of October 7, Ukrainian drones knocked out the largest data center of Yandex – Russia's Google – in Sasovo. It houses supercomputers Russia uses to train its AI. On October 9, a second Yandex data center in Kaluga went down. On October 11, a third, in Vladimir. On October 14, Ukraine hit a Sberbank data center worth over a billion dollars.

Afterwards, according to Cloudflare, automated traffic from Yandex's network dropped by about 94 percent. Zelensky said it was suddenly easier to breathe on many platforms – less hate, fewer provocations. Users on X noticed that even Musk's own posts were suddenly getting fewer than 5,000 likes.

Does that prove Russian bots were flooding Musk's platform? No. Fact-checkers like Snopes are clear that it doesn't – the Cloudflare numbers count every kind of bot, including harmless search crawlers. But I'm allowed to ask: why did X go quiet exactly when Russia's servers were burning? And why doesn't X simply open its data so independent researchers can check?

And I'm allowed to ask something else. Hold on to these dates. Because Washington's campaign against Ukraine began right in the middle of them.

Two weeks of betrayal

I'm writing this down day by day. Because I wouldn't believe it myself if I didn't see it in black and white.

October 9. Trump talks to Putin on the phone. Right after, he proudly announces a diesel deal: Russia gets to sell diesel on the world market, and the US loosens sanctions in return. The reason? Diesel is expensive because of the Iran war, and Americans vote on November 3. Trump trades Ukraine for cheap fuel and a few points in the polls. Putin gets fresh money for his war chest – blessed by the White House. Zelensky calls the deal absolutely terrible. I call it betrayal.

October 10–11. Trump's people threaten Kyiv and Europe: if Ukraine keeps hitting Russian refineries, it loses US intelligence and the weapons from the PURL program. Read that twice. Ukraine is supposed to stop hitting the oil that pays for Putin's war. And those weapons? Europe paid for them. With our money! Washington is even holding back Patriot missiles Europe has already paid for – exactly the interceptors Ukraine is running out of. That's not diplomacy. That's extortion.

October 12–14. For at least two nights, the warnings about Russian missiles heading for Kyiv don't come. According to CBS, the US may have withheld warnings ahead of strikes that killed six people and left 600,000 households without power.

Late on October 13. Ukraine's military Starlink – Starshield – suddenly stops working for anything moving faster than about 100 miles per hour. That means interceptor drones, the ones that hunt Russian drones over Ukrainian cities. That same night, Russia launches 39 ballistic and hypersonic missiles and 128 Shahed drones at Ukraine's energy grid. At least three civilians die, including a child – according to a letter Senators Adam Schiff, Peter Welch, Michael Bennet and three House members sent Musk on October 23. The next day, Musk writes that limits like these are decided by the US military and ultimately the president.

October 15. Musk stands on a stage in Texas and presents his new Tesla Roadster. It lifts off for a few seconds on compressed-gas jets. Musk shouts "Flying cars are real!" and his fans lose their minds. CBS covered the show. That is not a flying car. That is a strong fart with leather seats. While Ukrainian soldiers lost their connection, Musk made his toy hop.

October 16. Trump says: "I'm not a big fan of Zelensky." On the throttling: it wasn't him – and he doesn't think it was Elon either. The same day, The Telegraph reports, citing four sources, that Musk proposed the throttling to Trump himself – and Trump agreed.

October 17. Trump suspends new Russia sanctions and tariffs by executive order, one day before they would have taken effect. Senators from both parties had already asked him to reverse the diesel deal. He didn't care.

October 18. Trump says he doesn't want to drive Putin away from the table. And the US suggests that Europe buy Russian gas again as part of a peace deal. So we're supposed to fund the war we've spent years trying to stop? How stupid do they think we are?

October 19. Nova Vodolaha. Anhelina. The same day, Putin proposes a summit with Trump and Xi – about Ukraine, without Ukraine. And a Russian military blogger writes on Telegram that Ukrainian kamikaze drones barely hit anything on a supply highway in occupied territory anymore: obviously the result of the Starlink slowdown. Russia's war propagandists are practically thanking Elon Musk in person.

October 20. The Wall Street Journal reports: Musk ordered the throttling himself and discussed it with Trump afterwards. The motive: both were angry at Ukraine for hitting Russian diesel refineries, which Trump blames for high energy prices. Ukraine defends itself against the man bombing its children, hits his oil – and two Americans are angry. Not at Putin. At Ukraine!

October 21. Trump's envoy Witkoff sits down with Putin in St. Petersburg and calls him a Humanist. Starshield is still capped.

October 22. Overnight, Russia fires 21 ballistic missiles at Kyiv in three waves. Apartment blocks, a metro station, a monastery are hit. 34 people injured, including five children, at least two dead, Zelensky writes. Ballistic missiles are stopped by Patriots – the very Patriots Europe paid for and Washington keeps in storage. That evening, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump called Musk and asked him to lift the restrictions.

One phone call. That's all it ever took. For more than a week, Russian missiles and drones flew while interceptors stayed grounded – and all along, Trump only had to pick up the phone.

October 23. Zelensky tells ABC News that Starlink still isn't working, despite Trump's assurances. Musk, meanwhile, claims without any evidence that US aid to Ukraine gets laundered back into American election campaigns. Poland's foreign minister Radosław Sikorski answers dryly: the US stopped funding Ukraine last year – Europeans pay for the American weapons now.

October 24. Zelensky announces that Starlink and Starshield are back to their old speeds. He thanks Congress, senators, the media, the State Department – and the president. Eleven days. Eleven days during which Ukrainians had to defend themselves with one hand tied behind their back.

Six excuses, zero truth

So who ordered the throttling? Here's what we were told, in order.

Musk: the president decides. Trump: nobody, not even Elon. Secretary of State Rubio: these things happen – maybe a technical glitch. Defense Secretary Hegseth, in a clip circulating on X: Ukraine violated the terms of service. The Wall Street Journal: Musk himself. And finally, on October 24 – after everything had already been restored – Musk again: Ukraine violated Starlink's terms by using it for "offensive drone strikes to kill people," and that "loophole" was closed. Without Starlink, he added, Ukraine's front line would collapse immediately. "This is NOT a threat." And to everyone who disagrees: "May you burn in hell."

Six versions in two weeks. They don't even lie well anymore. They just lie, and they don't care if you notice.

Ukraine says it did not violate the terms of use. Serhii Sternenko, who worked inside Ukraine's defense ministry, explains why it wasn't even technically possible: since February, every terminal operating on the move had to run through Starshield – the military system controlled by the US government. So the "loophole" Musk is talking about was the system the Pentagon gave Ukraine.

And terms of service? Seriously? A country is invaded, its children die in parks, and you're talking about the fine print?

Did Musk kill Anhelina? No. That was a Russian drone, and I won't claim anything I can't prove. But whoever cuts a country's connection in the middle of a war of aggression accepts that people will die. Whoever withholds missile warnings accepts that people will die. Whoever leaves paid-for interceptors in a warehouse accepts that people will die. They know it. And they did it anyway.

I'm not alone in my anger. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, who chairs the European Parliament's defense committee, put it in a single question in Germany's WELT: How sick and depraved do you have to be?

He has done this before

If you think this was a one-off, you weren't paying attention in early 2025. As head of DOGE, Musk dismantled US foreign aid. He called USAID a "criminal organization" and bragged on X that he'd spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper – when he could have gone to some great parties instead. He was proud of it!

Into that wood chipper went vaccination programs, HIV medication, malaria nets, food aid for starving children. In July 2025, The Lancet projected that if the cuts stayed in place, more than 14 million additional people could die by 2030 – 4.5 million of them children under five. The Center for Global Development estimates that the cuts actually carried out likely cost between half a million and a million lives in 2025 alone. And who told Congress that nobody had died? Marco Rubio. The same Rubio who now says about Starlink: these things happen.

The New York Times chose a headline in May 2025 that I can't improve on: "Elon Musk's Legacy Is Disease, Starvation and Death." Political scientist Anton Shekhovtsov calls it death by indifference: the victims aren't hated. They simply don't matter. A number in an efficiency spreadsheet. First the poorest people in Africa and Asia. Now Ukraine.

And why is Musk so close to Trump? Look at his bank statements. According to Reuters, he has spent about $366 millionthis election cycle to keep Republicans in control of Congress – $276 million of it since July alone. Because if Democrats win, investigations loom: into his billions in government contracts, into DOGE, and now into Starshield. The Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has already opened an inquiry. And Musk? According to Forbes, he threatens retribution if Democrats investigate him after the midterms: "Live by the sword, die by the sword." A man who can switch a war's communications on and off is threatening elected representatives. Let that sink in.

The enablers

Musk isn't the only billionaire whose "glitches" keep landing on the same side.

On October 16, TikTok "permanently" suspended the ad account for Musk, Oscar winner Alex Gibney's critical documentary about Elon Musk – right as it opened in more than 470 theaters. TikTok's US business now belongs to an investor group around tech billionaire Larry Ellison. And Ellison appears in the film himself, in a message offering Musk billions to buy Twitter. Two days later the account was back – an error, they said. To be fair: TikTok bans paid political ads in general, and there's no proof of intent.

On October 17, nearly 3,000 No Kings rallies took place across the US. In the middle of the peak, Meta locked the movement's Instagram account. A technical error, Meta said. At exactly that hour. On exactly that account.

How many coincidences does it take before we stop calling them coincidences?

Is there a Russian president in the White House?

This question hasn't let go of me for days. I can't prove that Trump works for Putin. But look at the history.

In 1987, Trump traveled to Moscow, invited by the Soviet travel agency Intourist. In the early '90s his casinos went bankrupt, and the big American banks barely wanted to lend to him anymore. In 2008, his son Don Jr. told a real estate conference that Russians made up a disproportionate share of their assets. That same year, a Russian oligarch bought a Palm Beach mansion from Trump for $95 million – more than twice what Trump had paid. And Trump himself once said that if Putin likes him, it's an asset, not a liability.

Then there's Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law – the man negotiating Ukraine's future alongside Witkoff right now. According to an excerpt from investigative journalist Matthew Cole's book in Vanity Fair, Russian hackers broke into his iPhone and pulled data from it. That data ended up with Dutch intelligence through a Russian intelligence officer they had turned. The Dutch found no evidence of collusion with Russia – but they did watch Kushner move hundreds of millions of dollars from funds set up by Saudi Arabia and the UAE. What Russia knows about this man, nobody knows. And he sits at the table when Ukraine's fate is decided.

Meanwhile, Putin has Europe in his sights too. According to a new Wall Street Journal report, he personally ordered a new wave of attacks on NATO countries – frustrated by stalled negotiations and Ukraine's deep strikes into Russia. One of the opening shots: the explosives-laden drone found in August next to a Ukrainian cargo plane at Leipzig airport, which Germany's government officially blamed on Russia. Leipzig! That's not far away. That's here.

And now I see an American president who hands Putin sanctions relief. Who wants to sell Europe Russian gas. Who leaves paid-for weapons in storage. Who says of the leader of an invaded country that he's not a big fan. A president who never treats Putin the way he treats Zelensky. Garry Kasparov put it bluntly: now that Trump has officially joined the Russian side, Europe has to fight back – or lose a war it still refuses to admit it's in.

If Putin had been allowed to design a man for the White House, he would have designed exactly this one. I'm just asking: why?

Pressure works

I was born in 1982. I grew up with America. With the feeling that the good guys lived over there. The country that freed Europe from fascism. The country that kept Berlin alive with the airlift. The country that stood on the side of freedom when it counted. I loved that country. I admired it. I defended it when others mocked it.

And now I watch that same country stab the invaded in the back and shake the invader's hand. Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia bombs parks, strollers, power grids. This isn't complicated. There aren't "two sides" here. This is as clear a case of right and wrong as politics ever gets.

And the people in power chose the wrong side. Not "the Americans" – you took to the streets at nearly 3,000 rallies, and senators from both parties protested. Even Republicans like Thom Tillis and Kevin Cramer want investigations. But the people at the top: a corrupt president who sells out a whole nation for cheap diesel and a better election result. A billionaire with a god complex who switches wars on and off on a whim and makes cars hop in between. An armada of tech bosses whose "technical errors" always come at exactly the right moment – and always point in the same direction.

This is the worst thing I have ever witnessed in politics. I never thought I'd write that sentence about the United States. Not in my lifetime.

But here's the thing that gives me hope: it worked. Eleven days after the throttling began, Starshield was back. Not because Musk had a change of heart. Because members of Congress wrote letters, senators opened investigations, journalists kept digging, and people refused to shut up. According to The Telegraph, Musk was worried about a backlash from his customers in Europe. He's afraid of us. Good.

Europe has learned its lesson, too – or it had better. We paid for weapons that don't arrive. Our defense depends on a man who flips the switch whenever he feels like it. I'll say it as clearly as I can: a man who cut off the victim's communications in the middle of a war of aggression should never again run critical infrastructure in Europe. In my opinion, his products should be banned here for good. Starlink, Tesla, X, all of it. And until then, Europe needs its own satellites, its own networks, its own weapons. Finland's ICEYE and Nokia have just announced sovereign satellite communications for Ukraine. That's exactly the way.

And you, America? On November 3, you decide who gets to keep covering for all of this. I can't vote. You can. Vote out the people who looked away – or who held the switch.

Anhelina was fourteen months old. My daughter is three. I don't want her to grow up in a world where children die in parks while the powerful celebrate fuel deals and make cars hop.

Putin sent the drone. But Trump and Musk spent these days making it harder for Ukraine to defend itself against it. I will never forgive either of them for that.

I'm angry. And I'm not going to stop being angry.