Controversial billionaire, Elon Musk has confirmed that at some point in 2022, he actually refused to grant Ukraine a request to activate his Starlink satellite network in Crimea’s port city of Sevastopol to help them plant an attack on Russia’s fleet there.
He claimed that he declined the request out of concern that he would be involved in a “major” act of war.
After CNN cited a passage from a forthcoming biography of Musk that claims he ordered the Starlink network switched off close to the Crimean coast last year to thwart the Ukrainian sneak attack, the billionaire tycoon made the remark on his social media platform X.
Musk claimed in a post on X, then known as Twitter, that he was forced to decline a last-minute request from Ukraine “to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol.” He omitted to mention the request’s date, and neither the extract nor he did.
‘The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,’ Musk wrote. ‘If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.’
Africa Today News, New York reports that Russia, which seized the strategic Crimea peninsula in 2014, bases its Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol and has used the fleet in a de facto blockade of Ukrainian ports since its full-scale invasion in 2022.
The Russian fleet fires cruise missiles at Ukrainian civilian targets, and Kyiv has launched attacks on Russian ships using maritime drones.
According to CNN, Walter Isaacson’s new biography “Elon Musk,” to be released by Simon & Schuster on Tuesday, says that when Ukrainian explosive-laden submarine drones last year approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.”
It said Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack with nuclear weapons.
CNN said that according to the biography, this was based on Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials and his fears of a “mini-Pearl Harbor.”
In August, a Russian warship was seriously damaged in a Ukrainian naval drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea navy base at Novorossiysk, the first time the Ukrainian navy has projected its power so far from the country’s shores.
SpaceX, through private donations and under a separate contract with a U.S. foreign aid agency, has been providing Ukrainians and the country’s military with Starlink internet service, a fast-growing network of more than 4,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, since the beginning of the war in 2022.
The Pentagon said in June that SpaceX’s Starlink had a Department of Defense contract to buy satellite services for Ukraine.