Elon Musk Refuses to turn on His Network to Help Ukraine Attack The Russian Navy

 

Introduction (Editorial)by the Publisher, Adam Gonzalez

You can see Elon Musk at his best when he does awful things and excuses them as helping humanity

ie: Saving Russian lives, Saving the World against Nuclear war. Actually, he might have been thinking of getting Russian business when his buddy came back to power. Sometimes when a man involved in Space Rockets talks about aliens you give him the benefit of the doubt but when he shows he is still the ugly kid nobody liked in school all he had to do was read books, which he did. From now on if I see him on the news talking about aliens the picture my brain will form will be of Elon Musk. Today his decisions are based on how much he is disliked mainly by himself. Yes, he said human lives, the human lives that will take Ukranian human lives, and about Nukes, WW3 gets the thread every time Ukraine hits Putin in his infested kister. The reason for this war is that Russia stopped taking Ukrainian power and stealing Ukrainian kids, thus its leader, Putin found guilty by the World Court and issued an arrest warrant to go on trial. How come he did not see that? Ukraine was attacked, was the underdog, and has suffered unthinkable losses of young men compared to its size against Russia. Elon, again who were you defending? Maybe you and future business from Russia no matter who is at the helm.

Elon Musk foiled an attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet last year by refusing to let Ukraine use his satellite network to guide its drones, Mr. Musk has acknowledged, provoking a furious response from a top official in Kyiv and renewing questions about the global power wielded by a multimillionaire businessman.

Ukraine’s military forces have relied heavily on the Starlink satellites owned by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX company for communications since Russia disabled Ukraine’s internet services as part of its invasion in early 2022. But Mr. Musk would not allow the network to be used for an attack last September with maritime drones on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, the Ukrainian territory that Russia illegally seized in 2014 and then annexed.

At the time of the attempted attack, Mr. Musk spoke with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly I. Antonov, who had told him an attack on Crimea “could lead to a nuclear response,” according to a biography of Mr. Musk by the historian and journalist Walter Isaacson. Copies of the book were obtained by The New York Times from a bookstore on Friday, though it is not set to go on sale until Tuesday. The account was included in an excerpt from the book published on Thursday by The Washington Post.

Mr. Musk confirmed elements of the story, writing on his social network X, formerly Twitter, “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” 

Within days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Musk began sending Starlink terminals to the country — eventually more than 42,000 of them — in response to public pleas from Ukrainian officials. Throughout the war, the connectivity provided by Starlink has been pivotal for Ukraine’s military to coordinate drone strikes and gather intelligence, and it has also aided hospitals, businesses, and aid organizations across Ukraine.

Mr. Isaacson’s account left several questions unanswered, including who had initiated the call between Mr. Musk and Mr. Antonov, and whether Mr. Musk had revealed the planned attack to the Russian ambassador. The book says that Mr. Musk consulted with Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but not whether the American officials urged him to allow the attack to proceed.

 

Elon Musk appears on a video screen addressing a conference.

Elon Musk speaking during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in 2021.Credit...Nacho Doce/Reuters

Mr. Musk disputed one part of the account by Mr. Isaacson, who reported that Mr. Musk had instructed Starlink “engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast.” Mr. Musk said there had never been such coverage. The request he turned down, he said, was to extend the network’s range to allow the attack.

Ukrainian and U.S. officials have long been uneasy with the vital position in Ukraine held by Mr. Musk, reportedly the wealthiest person in the world. He has acknowledged for months being in contact with Russian as well as Ukrainian officials, raising concerns about his being influenced by the Kremlin’s view. He is also known for his unpredictability and has suggested elements of a peace settlement to the war that officials in Kyiv have dismissed as capitulation to aggression.

 

Mr. Musk said last October that he could not “indefinitely” finance Ukraine’s use of Starlink, then abruptly reversed course. The Pentagon later began paying at least part of the cost of the service. But because Starlink is a commercial product rather than a traditional defense contractor, Mr. Musk is able to make decisions that may not be aligned with U.S. interests, analysts have said.

The State of the War

Rostov-on-Don: Explosions rocked the Russian city, which is home to a key military hub; local officials later said that air defenses had shot down two drones. Ukraine never acknowledges strikes on Russian soil, but the incursions are happening with increasing frequency.

Ukraine’s Counteroffensive: Ukrainian forces, churning slowly forward after breaching Russia’s initial lines in the south, are turning their attention to breaking through in another heavily defended position.

Cluster Munitions: Ukrainian troops have embraced the controversial weapons in their fight against Russian forces. But are the U.S.-supplied bomblets making a difference?

Putin-Kim Meeting: Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, plans to travel to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin to discuss the possibility of supplying Russia with weaponry for its war in Ukraine.

Ukraine has no alternative to its satellite network, potentially giving him enormous power over the course of the war, just as the U.S. government has no alternative to SpaceX for some of its efforts to launch satellites and people into orbit. Ukraine has consulted other satellite internet providers, but no other services come close to Starlink’s reach.

Russia uses its ships to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine, often at civilian targets, and some Ukrainians insisted on Friday that an attack on the Black Sea fleet was little more than an act of self-defense.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, accused Mr. Musk of enabling Russian aggression. Because of Mr. Musk’s decision, “civilians, children are being killed,” he wrote on X on Thursday. “This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego.”

As long ago as February, Mr. Musk said that his company would not allow use of Starlink for long-range strikes by Ukraine, and a SpaceX executive said that Starlink had taken steps to curtail Ukraine’s use of the technology to control drones, infuriating Ukrainian officials.

 

Some sophisticated drones rely on satellite links for navigation, either autonomously or steered by a remote operator. Without that, the drones used in the attempted Sevastopol attack “washed ashore harmlessly,” Mr. Isaacson wrote.

The book quotes Mr. Musk as saying: “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation. We did not want to be a part of that.”

In July, The Times reported on Mr. Musk’s refusal to allow the service to work near Crimea, and the broader challenges Ukrainian officials were facing because of the country’s dependence on Starlink.

 

A rocket seconds after liftoff, with a column of flame and billowing smoke beneath it.

A video from SpaceX showing one of its Falcon 9 rockets lifting off in 2020 to launch 60 Starlink satellites into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Fla.Credit...SpaceX, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ukrainian troops use Starlink to communicate on encrypted messaging apps like Signal, to send each other live drone videos, to run a Ukrainian networked battlefield awareness app called Delta, and to unwind in their downtime, browsing the internet and talking to loved ones. 

On the Ukrainian side, the diminutive Starlink antennas, draped in camouflage nets, cables snaking back to a battery and internet router, are found in forests and fields, mounted on the roofs of trucks or propped up on sidewalks in frontline villages.

The system has increased the lethality of Ukrainian artillery strikes. Before Starlink turned up, spotters with binoculars or flying drones would radio coordinates to a commander, who would decide whether to strike, and then radio an artillery unit.

With Starlink, artillery teams, commanders, and drone pilots can all watch video feeds simultaneously while chatting online, cutting the time from finding a target to hitting it from nearly 20 minutes to a minute or so, soldiers have said in interviews.

“Starlink is indeed the blood of our entire communication infrastructure now,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister, told The Times in a recent interview.

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 correspondent based in Seoul focused on international breaking news coverage. More about Victoria Kim

Richard Pérez-Peña, an international news editor in New York, has been with The Times as a reporter and editor since 1992. He has worked on the Metro, National, Business, Media and International desks. More about Richard Pérez-Peña

Andrew E. Kramer is the Times bureau chief in Kyiv. He was part of a team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for a series on Russia’s covert projection of power. More about Andrew E. Kramer