SpaceX CEO Elon Musk officially admitted to thwarting a Ukrainian attack on the Russian naval fleet near the coast of Crimea by cutting off access to the Starlink Internet service at a crucial moment.
The billionaire, who is described as “mercurial,” said in a post on his owned X platform after the matter was revealed: “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate (Starlink) all the way to Sevastopol. The intention was clear: to sink most of the anchored Russian fleet.”
Musk’s claimed goal was to avoid dragging SpaceX into an international war, even though the company had donated tens of thousands of Starlink stations to soldiers on the front lines, something that became a point of pride for the CEO at the time.
“If you agree to their request, SpaceX will be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and escalation of conflict,” Musk added.
But the decision had another obvious consequence as well: it gave the opponent a massive tactical advantage on the battlefield, implicating Musk directly in the ongoing conflict.
Earlier this week, an upcoming biography of Musk, written by writer Walter Isaacson, revealed that Musk ordered SpaceX to cut off Ukrainian soldiers’ access to Starlink after discovering that drone submarines were on their way to attack Russian warships in Sevastopol.
Mask asked Isaacson: “How can I be in this war?” He added: “Starlink was not intended to participate in wars. “The goal was for people to be able to watch Netflix, relax, go online to go study, and do good peaceful things, not march strikes.”
It is believed that this admission is another example of Musk’s unexpected actions that have huge international consequences. Is it possible that Musk did not take into account the possibility of using Starlink in the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine? Knowing that satellite Internet service has quickly become a crucial tool in the arsenal of the Ukrainian front.
“Starlink is really the blood of the entire communications infrastructure now,” Mykhaylo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digitalization, recently told the New York Times.
It is not surprising that the news of Musk’s “sabotage” angered Ukrainian officials, as Mykhailo Podoliak, a senior advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, denounced the “billionaire’s interference.”
“As a result, civilians and children are being killed,” he said in a post on X. “This is the price of a combination of ignorance and big ego.”
