War in Ukraine: Elon Musk said he prevented Kyiv from attacking the Russian fleet

American billionaire Elon Musk claims he thwarted a Ukrainian attack on a Russian naval base last year by declining a request from Kiev to activate Internet access via its satellite in the Black Sea, near Moscow-annexed Crimea.

“We received an urgent request from the authorities to activate Starlink in Sevastopol. The obvious intention was to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he tweeted Thursday on X (formerly Twitter).

The city of Sevastopol is home to a Russian naval base located in the Black Sea on the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014.

“If I agreed to their demand, then SpaceX would be clearly involved in a major war and an escalation of the conflict,” Musk said. The billionaire spoke in response to a published excerpt from a future biography dedicated to him by Walter Isaacson.

Internet disabled

In an excerpt published by the Washington Post, Isaacson writes that in September 2022, “the Ukrainian military attempted a covert attack on the Russian navy based in Sevastopol by sending six small underwater drones loaded with explosives using Starlink” to guide them. to your goal.

Isaacson notes that the tycoon then “spoke to the Russian ambassador to the United States … who told him bluntly that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would lead to a nuclear response.”

According to Isaacson, Musk “secretly ordered his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 km of the Crimean coast. As the Ukrainian drones approached the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost contact and ran aground harmlessly.”

Expensive terminals

Internet service via the Starlink satellite, operated by Musk’s SpaceX, was deployed in Ukraine shortly after its invasion of Russia in February 2022. In October 2022, Musk stated that SpaceX no longer had a way to continue funding the Starlink internet network in Ukraine. making a strong appeal to the American government to take control. According to Elon Musk, about 25,000 terminals worth at least $80 million have been deployed in the country to date.

Elon Musk has intervened since the beginning of the war between the two countries. In October 2022, in a debate with Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian political leaders, he proposed a peace deal between Kiev and Moscow based on new UN-supervised referendums, the transfer 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 the proposal. Kyiv’s ambassador to Germany told him… “to go and see for yourself.”