Andrew Marr asks who controls Britain's wiring after Ukraine's Starlink slowdown

A Ukrainian MP and a former ambassador to Washington join the LBC host as Elon Musk points the finger at the US government's Starshield.

Channel: LBC Story of October 16, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 514,890 views a day, 13 times a normal first day on this channel (38,994).

Musk blames Trump for 'sabotaging' Ukraine’s Starlink

A slowdown in Ukraine's satellite internet is where Andrew Marr starts, but Britain is where he ends up. His LBC segment, "Musk blames Trump for 'sabotaging' Ukraine's Starlink", uses the dispute to ask what a country risks when its essential systems run on someone else's technology.

The description sets out the quarrel. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Donald Trump of betraying Ukraine by slowing the network, and Elon Musk has answered that the throttled systems were Starshield, the US government's version, not Starlink. Marr plays a clip of Zelenskyy telling Piers Morgan, "I'm sure that they knew what they did," then turns to the British state's own reliance on Palantir, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft. "If you don't control your own wiring... bye-bye the last shreds of independence," he says.

Lisa Yasko, a Ukrainian MP on her parliament's foreign affairs committee, joins by video link after heavy missile and drone strikes on Kyiv. She calls these the hardest days in five years, and adds: "We are exhausted, but that doesn't mean that we are intimidated."

In the studio, Lord Kim Darroch, the former national security adviser and ambassador to Washington, weighs the tech industry's pull in American politics, from JD Vance's ties to Peter Thiel to a blunt line: "Money talks, as you know, in American politics." His conclusion for Europe is that it does not yet have its own technology in these areas.

The segment passed a quarter of a million views in its first eight hours, already far beyond a usual full first day for the channel's longer videos. The comments came even faster, at around four times a normal first day's total. Most of them pick up Marr's sovereignty question rather than the Musk-Trump exchange: Europe, Britain and Canada finding their own alternatives to American tech and equipment.

It was a strong evening for Marr's program overall. His interview with Mary Trump about her uncle's presidency also started at roughly eight times the channel's usual pace, helping LBC to more than double its normal daily views.

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The numbers

The figures show a segment that opened far faster than LBC's regular videos usually do, with the comments running even further ahead.

the video's first day

usual first day here

38,994

this video

514,890

subscribers

1,540,000

▲ 10,000 in the last 7 days

total views

1,830,543,059

views per day

4,294,749

typical day: 1,840,409

the video

views

254,670

likes

2,919

comments

755

days online

1

subscribers: this channel and similar channels

People

1,550,000

LBC

1,540,000

TalkTV

1,470,000

news.com.au

1,390,000

Times Radio

1,310,000

Times Now World

1,290,000

As of October 16, 2026 · Data source: Trari Social News, Trari Traffic Trends and Ranking Platform, Google YouTube

Subscriber, view, like and comment counts are YouTube's. Rates, usual days, rankings, comparisons and categories are Trari's own calculations.