The American billionaire Elon Musk claims to have prevented a Ukrainian attack against a Russian navy base last year by refusing a request from kyiv to activate via its satellite Internet access in the Black Sea, near Crimea annexed by Moscow.
“We have received an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink to Sevastopol. The obvious intention was to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter) on Thursday.
There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol.
The obvious intention 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…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 7, 2023
The city of Sevastopol is home to the base of the Russian fleet positioned in the Black Sea on the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014.
“Had I agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and an escalation of conflict,” Musk said. The billionaire was speaking in response to an excerpt published from an upcoming biography dedicated to him by Walter Isaacson.
Internet disabled
In an extract published by the Washington PostIsaacson writes that in September 2022, “the Ukrainian military attempted a masked attack on the Russian naval fleet based in Sevastopol, sending six small underwater drones packed with explosives, using Starlink” in order to guide them to their target.
Isaacson points out that the tycoon then “spoke to the Russian ambador to the United States… who explicitly told him that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would result in a nuclear response.”
According to Isaacson, Musk “secretly told his engineers to disable coverage within 100 km of the Crimean coast. When Ukrainian drones approached the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and landed harmlessly.”
Expensive terminals
THE Internet service via Starlink satelliteoperated by Musk-owned SpaceX, had been deployed in Ukraine shortly after its invasion by Russia in February 2022. In October 2022, Musk claimed that SpaceX could no longer afford to continue to finance the Starlink Internet network in Ukraine, appealing to the American government to take over. Some 25,000 terminals had been deployed in the country to date, according to Elon Musk, at a cost of at least $80 million.
Elon Musk has been intervening since the start of the war between the two countries. In October 2022, during a debate with Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian politicians, he had proposed a peace agreement between kyiv and Moscow based on new referendums under UN supervision, the abandonment of Crimea to Russia and a “ neutral status » for Ukraine. The American billionaire left his Twitter followers the choice to vote “Yes” or “No” to this proposal. The kyiv ambador to Germany told him… “to go to hell”.