Elon Musk gave a secret order to disable temporarily Starlink satellite communications near Crimea. This was done in order to disrupt a Ukrainian drone attack on Crimea, according to Politico.
In Walter Isaacson’s upcoming print biography “Elon Musk” there is a quote:
“Musk was concerned that an attack by an unmanned submarine targeting the Russian navy at Sevastopol would escalate tensions and potentially lead to nuclear war”.
However, on Thursday evening Musk made his clarifications. He said that satellites in those regions had never been turned on and he just decided not to activate them.
An extract, published by the Washington Post on Thursday, shows how Musk’s support for Ukraine is increasingly fading.
Isaacson writes that Musk reportedly panicked when he heard that Ukraine was going to attack Russia and Starlink satellites would guide six drones packed with explosives towards the Crimea coast.
After speaking to the Russian ambassador to the United States — who reportedly told him an attack on Crimea would trigger a nuclear response — Musk took matters into his own hands and ordered his engineers to turn off Starlink coverage “within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast.”
This caused a loss of contact with the drones, after which they were “harmlessly washed ashore”, effectively sabotaging the offensive mission.
Ukraine reacted very fast: officials frantically called Musk and asked him to turn the service back on, telling him that the “drone subs were crucial to their fight for freedom.” However, Musk stayed unshakable. He argued that Ukraine was “going too far and inviting strategic defeat” and that he did not want his satellites used for offensive purposes.
This was a turning point of a well-documented cooling of relationships between Ukrainian forces and the billionaire entrepreneur, who had been helping keep Ukraine online with his Starlink satellites from the outbreak of war, as Ukrainian infrastructure was severely ruined by Russian attacks.
Musk started restricting the Ukrainian military’s use of Starlink in Russian-controlled regions and for drone control when Ukraine moved on the offensive. He also warned he would stop financially supporting of the service. His excuse was still the same: he did not want the conflict between Ukraine and Russia to turn into a world war.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk said on X (formerly Twitter). “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Russia’s former President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday praised Musk’s decision to turn off Starlink during Ukraine’s strike attempt. He posted on Musk’s X:
“If what Isaacson has written in his book is true, then it looks like Musk is the last adequate mind in North America,” “Or, at the very least, in gender-neutral America, he is the one with the balls.”
“Elon Musk,” a biography by historian, professor and former Time magazine editor Isaacson, is set to be released on September 12.
