Elon Musk sparks fury as billionaire admits scuppering Ukrainian assault on Russia

Elon Musk has sparked a backlash as he admitted his Starlink satellite tv for pc communications community was not activated close to the Crimean coast – successfully thwarting a sneak assault by Ukrainian forces on Russian ships.

Ukrainian officers have reacted furiously to claims in a brand new biography of the tech billionaire which reportedly says the key order meant Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” as they approached the Russian fleet final 12 months.

An aide to Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, Mykhailo Podolyak, responded to the claims and stated the choice successfully allowed the Russian warships “to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities”.

“Sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake,” Mr Podolyak wrote.

Ukraine war latest: Billionaire’s admission sets worrying precedent

But for Musk, the choice to not activate the service was a method of maintaining Starlink out of the battle and avoiding disaster.

Musk posted on X, previously Twitter, in a single day, that agreeing to Kyiv’s “emergency request” to activate Starlink “all the way to Sevastopol”, would have meant SpaceX could be “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation”.

“The Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything,” he stated.

“Both sides should agree to a truce. Every day that passes, more Ukrainian and Russian youth die to gain and lose small pieces of land, with borders barely changing. This is not worth their lives.”

It comes following excerpts printed by CNN, from Walter Isaacson’s soon-to-be-released biography of Musk, wherein the billionaire is alleged to imagine Starlink “was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes”.”

And that Musk wanted to avoid what he called “a mini-Pearl Harbour”.

After Russia disrupted Ukraine’s communications methods simply earlier than its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Musk agreed to offer Ukraine with tens of millions of {dollars} of SpaceX-made Starlink satellite tv for pc terminals, which grew to become essential to Ukraine’s navy operations.

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Those terminals allowed Ukraine to remain related regardless of Moscow’s interference with its technological infrastructure.

Mr Isaacson has beforehand written biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein.