What happened
Ukraine’s Starlink and military-grade Starshield satellite connection was restored to full speed over the weekend, after a week of throttled service that neutered the country’s drone defenses and short-range offensive capabilities. Shortly after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the full restoration of service on Saturday, Elon Musk acknowledged that he had ordered the Starlink caps.

Who said what
“Ukraine military violated Starlink terms of service and used it for offensive drone strikes to kill people,” Musk said on social media. “That loophole was closed last week.” Zelenskyy adviser Serhii Beskrestnov responded that Ukraine “physically cannot use commercial Starlink” in the way Musk described.

Musk insisted that the U.S. government controlled any changes to Starlink’s military version, however. The “order to throttle Starshield came from inside the White House,” Reuters said. President Donald Trump has maintained he did not order any such caps, “while Vice President JD Vance has hinted at White House coordination with Musk,” The Associated Press said. Trump asked Musk last week to lift the limitations, according to The Wall Street Journal. “I’ve heard it was fixed but if it’s not, I’ll speak to him,” Trump told reporters on Friday.

What next?
Congressional Democrats have announced plans to investigate who ordered the unannounced limits on Ukraine’s service, and the national security implications if Musk, a private citizen, can do so at will. 

What happened
Serbia’s longtime leader Aleksandar Vucic last night conceded defeat in national elections to a student-led movement that gained broad public support during two years of protests. “It is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won,” Vucic said in a televised address. Based on preliminary results, he said, the Student List candidate won 135-140 seats in Serbia’s 250-seat Parliament, while his right-wing populist Serbian Progressive Party would get 105 seats. 

Who said what
Vucic’s defeat marks a “seismic political shift in the Balkan country” of 6.5 million, where the “increasingly authoritarian” strongman had “led with virtually absolute power for 14 years,” The Associated Press said. Vucic had “routinely outplayed Serbia’s fractured opposition” for years, but the “leaderless youth movement proved to be a tough opponent.”

His defeat “came just six months after voters in neighboring Hungary rejected their own populist nationalist leader,” Vucic ally Viktor Orbán, The New York Times said. The Student List candidates focused on “rampant corruption,” but on “many contentious issues” like Russia and the European Union, it appears "little divides” Vucic’s party and yesterday’s victors.

What next?
It’s “unclear who will be prime minister and enact the students’ domestic agenda,” Reuters said. The university students who formed the Student List didn’t run, instead nominating a slate of “largely unknown candidates” including “university professors, actors and farmers.”

As Europe “struggles to fill its seminaries,” an island in majority-Muslim Indonesia has become one of the “world’s leading exporters of missionaries,” said The Economist. Flores, in the southeast of the Indonesian archipelago, is part of a handful of islands in the most populous Muslim nation that has a Christian majority, with 80% of its 2 million inhabitants identifying as Roman Catholic.

Catholicism arrived in Flores in the 16th century, when Portuguese spice traders brought missionaries to the “rugged, mountainous island,” said the National Catholic Register. The faith is “deeply rooted” in its culture, and many young men choose to devote their lives to the church.

Priests trained on Flores go on to serve in the U.S., Africa, Europe and South America. Indonesian priests have “earned a good reputation and are considered fair and tolerant, particularly on LGBT topics,” said France 24. The Catholic Church considers Flores “indispensable to its future and survival in the region.”

Over the past half-century, the number of trainee priests has “declined sharply” in Europe and North America as the “prestige of the role diminished in the face of child abuse scandals and increasing secularism,” said The Economist. In 2024, an estimated 4,150 trainee priests were enrolled in seminaries on Flores. Ireland, “by contrast, had just 104.” And the Catholic Church hopes that Flores will play a major part in addressing this shortfall.