A senior Ukrainian official has accused US technology tycoon Elon Musk of “committing evil” by ordering his engineers to restrict internet access to Kyiv’s military to prevent a strike on Russian warships that frequently bombard Ukraine’s cities.
Excerpts from a new biography of Mr Musk claim he told his SpaceX firm to shut down its Starlink internet service near occupied Crimea last year due to fear of how Russia would react to an attack by Ukrainian marine drones on its naval fleet in the Black Sea.
“The Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything,” Mr Musk countered on social media. “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” he added, referring to the main base of Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014.
“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 said.
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Ukrainian officials dismiss such fears of “escalation”, pointing out that Russia’s war has already killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions, and noting that Moscow will simply invent a pretext for any military action it wants to take – as it did to justify its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when it made unfounded claims to be under threat of attack from Nato states working in cahoots with a supposed “Nazi regime” in Kyiv.
“Sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake. By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via Starlink interference, Elon Musk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities,” wrote Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, referring to cruise missiles fired by Russian ships.
“As a result, civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego. However, the question still remains: why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realise that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?” he added.
Ukraine has leant heavily on Mr Musk’s Starlink satellite communications network to maintain internet access for civilians in frontline areas and military units on the battlefield since Russia launched its all-out invasion 18 months ago.
It has been a vital but sometimes prickly relationship, and Ukrainian officials talk about the need to manage relations carefully with the capricious tycoon, who has at times been accused of echoing Kremlin talking points and conspiracy theories and of doing too little to remove Russian propaganda from his social media site X, formerly Twitter.
