Tesla CEO Elon Musk climbs into a Tesla car as he leaves a hotel in Beijing, China, May 31, 2023. Portal/Tingshu Wang/File Photo Acquire LICENSE RIGHTS
WASHINGTON, Sept 8 (Portal) – Elon Musk said he rejected a Ukrainian request last year to activate its Starlink satellite network in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol to support an attack on the Russian fleet there, saying he fears complicity in a “great” act of war.
The billionaire businessman made this comment on his social media platform
In the post on He did not mention the date of the request and the extract did not contain any information about it.
“The apparent intent was to sink the majority of the anchored Russian fleet,” Musk wrote. “If I had agreed to their request, SpaceX would be explicitly engaged in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Russia, which captured the strategic Crimean peninsula in 2014, has based its Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol and has used the fleet to de facto blockade Ukrainian ports since its full-scale invasion in 2022.
The Russian fleet fires cruise missiles at Ukrainian civilian targets, and Kiev has launched attacks on Russian ships using maritime drones.
According to CNN, Walter Isaacson’s new biography “Elon Musk,” published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, says that Ukrainian explosives-laden submarine drones “lost connection” as they approached the Russian fleet last year and washed harmlessly ashore.”
It said Musk’s decision, which led to Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack with nuclear weapons.
CNN said this was based on Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials and his fears of a “mini-Pearl Harbor,” according to the biography.
In August, a Russian warship was severely damaged in a Ukrainian Navy drone attack on Russia’s Novorossiysk naval base on the Black Sea. This was the first time that the Ukrainian Navy had ever exerted its power far beyond the country’s coast.
SpaceX, through private donations and under a separate contract with a U.S. aid organization, has been providing Starlink internet service, a rapidly growing network of more than 4,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, to Ukrainians and the country’s military since the start of the war each year 2022.
The Pentagon said in June that SpaceX’s Starlink had a contract with the Defense Department to purchase satellite services for Ukraine.
Vadym Skybytskyi, an official at the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s GUR intelligence directorate, did not directly address whether Musk had rejected Ukraine’s request in his comment on the reports on Ukrainian state television. But he said it was necessary to investigate and “appoint a special group to investigate what happened.”
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment on Musk’s decision but said: “The department continues to work closely with commercial industry to ensure we have the right capabilities Ukrainians need for self-defense.”
Reporting by David Brunnstrom, Jonathan Landay, Phil Stewart and Ron Popeski; Editing by Don Durfee and Cynthia Osterman
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