Elon Musk claimed that he turned down a proposal from the Ukrainian government to turn on his Starlink satellite network near Sevastopol, the port city of Crimea, last year in order to support an assault on the Russian navy there, citing his concern over being implicated in a "major" act of war.
The billionaire businessman made the comment on his social media platform X after CNN highlighted an excerpt from a recent biography of Musk that claims he ordered the Starlink network turn off near the Crimean coast last year in order to thwart the Ukrainian covert operation.
Musk wrote on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that he had to turn down a last-minute request from Ukraine "to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol." Both he and the excerpt omitted to include the request's date.
"The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor," Musk states. "If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation."
Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia, which seized the strategically vital Crimea peninsula in 2014, has used the Black Sea Fleet, which is based in Sevastopol, to blockade Ukrainian ports.
The Russian fleet launches cruise missiles against Ukrainian civilian sites, and Kiev has carried out marine drone attacks on Russian vessels.
According to CNN, the latest biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, "Elon Musk," which will be published by Simon & Schuster next week, claims that when Ukrainian submarine drones carrying explosives last year approached the Russian fleet, they "lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly."
It said Musk's decision, which left Ukrainian authorities pleading with him to activate the satellites, was motivated by a fear that Russia might respond to a Ukrainian invasion with nuclear weapons.
Musk's fears of a "mini-Pearl Harbour" were based on contacts with senior Russian officials and his fears of a "mini-Pearl Harbour."
The first time the Ukrainian navy has extended its reach thus far from its borders was in August when a Ukrainian naval drone attacked the Russian Black Sea navy station in Novorossiysk, gravely damaging a Russian cruiser.
Since the start of the war in 2022, SpaceX has been providing Ukrainians and the country's military with Starlink internet service, a rapidly increasing network of over 4,000 satellites in low Earth orbit, through private donations and a separate contract with a U.S. foreign aid agency.
In June, the Pentagon announced that SpaceX's Starlink had been awarded a Department of Defence contract to purchase satellite services for Ukraine.
Commenting on the reports on Ukrainian national television, Vadym Skybytskyi, an officer in the Ukrainian Defence Ministry's Intelligence Directorate GUR, did not explicitly address whether Musk had denied Ukraine's request. But he added it was vital to investigate and "appoint a specific group to examine what happened."
