Musk confirms averting possible Ukrainian strike aiming to 'sink most of Russian fleet'
Elon Musk (photo - EPA)

The head of SpaceX, Elon Musk, reacted to the scandal with his refusal to support the Ukrainian military operation against the Russian Black Sea Fleet in occupied Crimea in 2022. He clarified that he did not turn off the Starlink satellite communication for the Ukrainian kamikaze drones in the Black Sea, but refused to turn it on there at the request of Ukraine.

Around the same time, the Russian side captured intact copies of Ukrainian naval drones that washed ashore for an unknown reason.

On X (formerly Twitter), Musk said that "there was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol."

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According to him, he responded to Kyiv with a refusal due to fears of "conflict escalation".

Previously, Musk has repeatedly written that he is afraid of Russian President Vladimir Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons if the Armed Forces go to liberate the peninsula captured by the Russians.

"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," he wrote.

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In July 2023, American media reported that Musk rejected Ukraine's request to activate Starlink near Crimea and that his decision affected the war strategy. After that, the Pentagon ensured the purchase of Starlink terminals and services for Ukraine, which the founder of the company could not turn off at will. After the scandal, Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov said that it was unfair to blame Musk, since he helped speed up the delivery of about 10,000 Starlink terminals when in November 2022 Ukraine faced major power outages due to Russian strikes. Currently, in Ukraine, about 50,000 terminals are used by the military, hospitals, enterprises and humanitarian organizations.

He then added that he allegedly did not turn off the service over the water area, because "the Starlink regions in question were not activated."

"SpaceX did not deactivate anything," Musk said.

Then the head of SpaceX, who in the situation of the genocidal war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine, from time to time directly or indirectly supports Russian propaganda, in particular through the spread of Moscow's fakes to its multi-million audience, again stated that "both sides should agree to a truce."

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This must be done, he writes, because "every day that passes, more Ukrainian and Russian youth die to gain and lose small pieces of land, with borders barely changing." This, in his opinion, is "not worth their lives."

In the spring, Musk refused to delete Medvedev's tweet about the "disappearance" of Ukraine.

In March 2023, it was reported that Starlink blocks the terminals of the Ukrainian military not only in the combat zone or in the occupied territory, but also on water.

In April, Musk was among TIME's 100 most influential people of 2023 described as "the opposite of progress".