Elon Musk Refused to Enable Ukraine Drone Attack on Russian Fleet

Elon Musk foiled an assault on Russia’s Black Sea fleet final 12 months by refusing to let Ukraine use his satellite tv for pc community to information its drones, Mr. Musk has acknowledged, scary a livid response from a prime official in Kyiv and renewing questions concerning the world energy wielded by a multibillionaire businessman.

Ukraine’s navy forces have relied closely on the Starlink satellites owned by Mr. Musk’s SpaceX firm for communications since Russia disabled Ukraine’s web providers as a part of its invasion in early 2022. But Mr. Musk wouldn’t enable the community for use for an assault final September with maritime drones on the Russian naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, the Ukrainian territory that Russia illegally seized in 2014 after which annexed.

At the time of the tried assault, Mr. Musk spoke with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Anatoly I. Antonov, who had informed him an assault on Crimea “could lead to a nuclear response,” in accordance with a biography of Mr. Musk by the historian and journalist Walter Isaacson. Copies of the ebook have been obtained by The New York Times from a bookstore on Friday, although it isn’t set to go on sale till Tuesday. The account was included in an excerpt from the ebook revealed on Thursday by The Washington Post.

Mr. Musk confirmed components of the story, writing on his social community X, previously Twitter, “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Within days of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr. Musk started sending Starlink terminals to the nation — finally greater than 42,000 of them — in response to public pleas from Ukrainian officers. Throughout the conflict, the connectivity offered by Starlink has been pivotal for Ukraine’s navy to coordinate drone strikes and collect intelligence, and it has additionally aided hospitals, companies and assist organizations throughout Ukraine.

Mr. Isaacson’s account left a number of questions unanswered, together with who had initiated the decision between Mr. Musk and Mr. Antonov, and whether or not Mr. Musk had revealed the deliberate assault to the Russian ambassador. The ebook says that Mr. Musk consulted with Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s nationwide safety adviser, and Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, however not whether or not the American officers urged him to permit the assault to proceed.

Mr. Musk disputed one a part of the account by Mr. Isaacson, who reported that Mr. Musk had instructed Starlink “engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast.” Mr. Musk mentioned there had by no means been such protection. The request he turned down, he mentioned, was to increase the community’s vary to permit the assault.

Ukrainian and U.S. officers have lengthy been uneasy with the very important place in Ukraine held by Mr. Musk, reportedly the wealthiest individual on the earth. He has acknowledged for months being involved with Russian in addition to Ukrainian officers, elevating issues about his being influenced by the Kremlin’s view. He can be recognized for his unpredictability and has advised components of a peace settlement to the conflict that officers in Kyiv have dismissed as capitulation to aggression.

Mr. Musk mentioned final October that he couldn’t “indefinitely” finance Ukraine’s use of Starlink, then abruptly reversed course. The Pentagon later started paying not less than a part of the price of the service. But as a result of Starlink is a industrial product somewhat than a standard protection contractor, Mr. Musk is ready to make selections that is probably not aligned with U.S. pursuits, analysts have mentioned.

Ukraine has no different to his satellite tv for pc community, probably giving him monumental energy over the course of the conflict, simply because the U.S. authorities has no different to SpaceX for a few of its efforts to launch satellites and other people into orbit. Ukraine has consulted different satellite tv for pc web suppliers, however no different providers come near Starlink’s attain.

Russia makes use of its ships to launch cruise missiles at Ukraine, typically at civilian targets, and a few Ukrainians insisted on Friday that an assault on the Black Sea fleet was little greater than an act of self-defense.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a prime adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky, accused Mr. Musk of enabling Russian aggression. Because of Mr. Musk’s determination, “civilians, children are being killed,” he wrote on X on Thursday. “This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego.”

As way back as February, Mr. Musk mentioned that his firm wouldn’t enable use of Starlink for long-range strikes by Ukraine, and a SpaceX govt mentioned that Starlink had taken steps to curtail Ukraine’s use of the expertise to manage drones, infuriating Ukrainian officers.

Some refined drones depend on satellite tv for pc hyperlinks for navigation, both autonomously or steered by a distant operator. Without that, the drones used within the tried Sevastopol assault “washed ashore harmlessly,” Mr. Isaacson wrote.

The ebook quotes Mr. Musk as saying: “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation. We did not want to be a part of that.”

In July, The Times reported on Mr. Musk’s refusal to permit the service to work close to Crimea, and the broader challenges Ukrainian officers have been dealing with due to the nation’s dependence on Starlink.

Ukrainian troops use Starlink to speak on encrypted messaging apps like Signal, to ship one another stay drone movies, to run a Ukrainian networked battlefield consciousness app known as Delta, and to unwind of their down time, shopping the web and speaking to family members.

On the Ukrainian aspect, the diminutive Starlink antennas, draped in camouflage nets, cables snaking again to a battery and web router, are present in forests and fields, mounted on the roofs of vehicles or propped up on sidewalks in frontline villages.

The system has elevated the lethality of Ukrainian artillery strikes. Before Starlink turned up, spotters with binoculars or flying drones would radio coordinates to a commander, who would determine whether or not to strike, then radio an artillery unit.

With Starlink, artillery groups, commanders and drone pilots can all watch video feeds concurrently whereas chatting on-line, chopping the time from discovering a goal to hitting it from practically 20 minutes to a minute or so, troopers have mentioned in interviews.

“Starlink is indeed the blood of our entire communication infrastructure now,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister, informed The Times in a current interview.