Elon Musk said he rejected a Ukrainian request to activate its Starlink satellite network in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol last year to help an attack on the Russian fleet there, saying he feared being complicit in a “big” act. of war.
Elon Musk said he rejected a Ukrainian request to activate its Starlink satellite network in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol last year to help an attack on the Russian fleet there, saying he feared being complicit in a “big” act of war.
The billionaire made the comment on his social media platform
Posting on X – formerly known as Twitter – late Thursday, Musk said he had no choice but to reject an emergency request from Ukraine “to activate Starlink to Sevastopol.” He did not give the date of the petition and the extract did not specify it.
“The obvious intention was to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” Musk wrote. “If I had acceded to his request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and escalation of the conflict.”
Russia, which seized the strategic Crimean 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 against Russian vessels 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 underwater drones loaded with explosives approached the Russian fleet last year, “they lost connectivity and “they came ashore harmlessly.”
According to the biography, Musk’s decision, which prompted Ukrainian authorities to plead with him to turn the satellites back on, was prompted by fears 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 high-ranking Russian officials and his fears of a “mini-Pearl Harbor.”
In August, a Russian warship was severely damaged in a Ukrainian naval drone attack on the Russian Black Sea naval base in Novorossiysk, the first time the Ukrainian navy 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 rapidly growing network of more than 4,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, since the start of the war in 2022.
