Elon Musk has acknowledged that he denied satellite internet service in order to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet last year. The Starlink satellite internet service has been a digital lifeline in Ukraine since the early days of the war.
On Thursday, CNN reported that an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography, “Elon Musk” said the billionaire had ordered the deactivation of Starlink satellite service near the coast of Crimea last September to thwart the Ukrainian attack. The excerpt said Musk had talks with a Russian official that led him to worry that an attack on Crimea could spiral into a nuclear conflict.
Musk responded to say that he hadn’t disabled the service but had rather refused to comply with an emergency request from Ukrainian officials to enable Starlink connections to Sevastopol on the Crimean peninsula. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” he wrote on X. That drew an angry response from Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukraine president. Musk’s “interference”, he said, had allowed Russia’s navy to continue firing cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.