A top adviser to the Ukrainian president accused Elon Musk of enabling Russian aggression after the billionaire entrepreneur admitted that he denied satellite internet service last year to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet.
The satellite internet service Starlink, operated by Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, has been a digital lifeline in Ukraine for both civilians and soldiers in areas where digital infrastructure has been wiped out since the early days of the war.
On Thursday, CNN reported on an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s biography “Elon Musk,” later published by The Washington Post, which said the billionaire ordered the deactivation of the Starlink satellite service near the coast of Crimea last September to prevent the Ukrainian attack. to thwart. The excerpt said that Musk had conversations with a Russian official that led him to worry that an attack on Crimea could turn into a nuclear conflict.
Later on Thursday, Mr Musk responded on his social media platform by saying he had not turned off the service, but rather refused to comply with an emergency request from Ukrainian officials to allow Starlink connections to Sevastopol on the occupied Crimean peninsula . That was, in fact, an admission that he had made the decision to prevent a Ukrainian attack.
“The obvious intention is to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” He wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Had I agreed to their request, SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and escalation of conflict.”
That provoked an angry response from Mychailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodimir Zelensky of Ukraine. Musk’s “interference,” he said, had enabled the Russian fleet to fire cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.
“As a result, civilians and children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and a big ego,” he says wrote on X.
The biography’s account further confirms the ways Musk’s control of Starlink appears to be affecting the Ukrainian military. In July, The New York Times reported on Musk’s refusal to allow the service to operate near Crimea, as well as the wider challenges facing Ukrainian officials because of the country’s massive dependence on Starlink.
Within days of Ukraine’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr Musk sent Starlink terminals to the country in response to public pleas from Ukrainian officials. Throughout the war, Starlink’s connectivity has been critical to Ukraine coordinating drone strikes and gathering intelligence.
The more than 42,000 Starlink terminals are also used by hospitals, businesses and aid organizations throughout Ukraine.
But Musk has repeatedly stirred up controversy around access to Starlink, saying last October that he couldn’t fund Ukrainian use of Starlink “indefinitely,” after which he abruptly reversed course. The near-total control he exercises over connectivity in the war zone has raised concerns about his influence.
In February, Ukrainian officials were angry after a SpaceX executive said Starlink had taken steps to curb the Ukrainian military’s use of the technology to control drones, a week after Mr Musk said the company “did not allow that Starlink was used for a long time”. remote drone strikes.” SpaceX has also used a process called geofencing to limit where Starlink is available on the front lines.
Because Starlink is a commercial product and not a traditional defense contractor, Mr. Musk may make decisions that may not align with US interests, analysts say.
Ukraine, concerned about over-reliance on Starlink, has consulted other satellite internet providers, but no other service comes close to its reach, officials said.
“Starlink is indeed now the blood of our entire communications infrastructure,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s minister of digital affairs, told The New York Times in a recent interview.
