Elon Musk says he refused to give Kyiv access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea to avoid complicity in a “major act of war”.
Kyiv had sent an emergency request to activate Starlink to Sevastopol, home to a major Russian navy port, he said.
His comments came after a book alleged he had switched off Starlink to thwart a drone attack on Russian ships.
A senior Ukrainian official says this enabled Russian attacks and accused him of “committing evil”.
Russian naval vessels had since taken part in deadly attacks on civilians, he said.
“By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via Starlink interference, Elon Musk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities,” he said.
“Why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?” he added.
The row follows the release of a biography of the billionaire by Walter Isaacson which alleges that Mr Musk switched off Ukraine’s access to Starlink because he feared that an ambush of Russia’s naval fleet in Crimea could provoke a nuclear response from the Kremlin.
Ukraine targeted Russian ships in Sevastopol with submarine drones carrying explosives but they lost connection to Starlink and “washed ashore harmlessly”, Mr Isaacson wrote.
Starlink terminals connect to SpaceX satellites in orbit and have been crucial for maintaining internet connectivity and communication in Ukraine as the conflict has disrupted the country infrastructure.
SpaceX, in which Mr Musk is the largest shareholder, began providing thousands of Starlink satellite dishes to Ukraine shortly after Russia launched its full-scale assault on its neighbour in February last year.
Responding to the book’s claim, Mr Musk said on X that SpaceX “did not deactivate anything” because it had not been activated in those regions in the first place.
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he said.
“If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, eight years before Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine
In the past, Mr Musk has said that while the system had “become the connectivity backbone of Ukraine all the way up to the front lines”, “we are not allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes”.
Mr Musk reiterated the point to Mr Isaacson, asking: “How am I in this war? 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.”
He also offered a personal opinion, calling for a truce and saying that Ukrainians and Russians were dying “to gain and lose small pieces of land” and this was not worth their lives.
He provoked anger last year when he proposed a plan to end the war which suggested the world formally recognise Crimea as part of Russia and asking residents of regions seized by Russia last year to vote on which country they wanted to be part of.
Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said that plan displayed “moral idiocy”
Nationalize Starlink and SpaceX
But that’s socialism /s
Nationalise.
It’s a Z in American English. Both spellings are correct.
Nope, it comes from Old French which used the same “s” as Latin whereas the “z” is greek. The French standardised to the “s” in the late 1600 which informed the English which had bounced between the Greek and Latin but formalised on “ise” not “ize”.
So, nationalise is the correct one here.
You’re entitled to your hill, but as linguistically correct as you may be, linguistics take a back seat to common usage and national variance.
Nationalized and nationalised are both English terms. Nationalized is predominantly used in 🇺🇸 American (US) English ( en-US ) while nationalised is predominantly used in 🇬🇧 British English (used in UK/AU/NZ) ( en-GB ).
Yeah what kind of linguistics dweeb doesn’t understand that language is fluid and shapes with time and location.
I’d love to see this tool be held to the spelling standards of old English. You know… to preserve the English language.
Butan hwi?
Literally the first thing you learn in linguistics is that the malleability in language is why linguistics exists.
Which is literally why “literally” and “figuratively” as practically interchangable due to misuse of ‘literally’ as hyperbole. Its figuratively killing me.
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How is dismissing a correction with a blunt “nope” nice and tacking on etymology when we’re talking about modern use of the word?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nationalize
You thought you were smart to correct what you thought was a mistake. You were mistaken, because you’re less smart than you think you are, and not smart enough to know that you don’t know that much.
Rather than admit that you’re less smart than you think you are, you’ve doubled down and become rude about it.
Vanity, it’s the devil’s favourite sin.
Obviously, it’s pathetic. We’ve all been there, but you really should learn when to walk away rather than doubling down.
Everyone should just report this idiot and move on. You can’t fix stupid.
Wow, this really upset a bunch of the Lemmy toxic club didn’t jt. Honestly, Reddit may be crap but lemmy is doing it’s best to ape it’s toxicity.
God damn just accept you’re wrong. You look like an absolute fool at this point.
Yes, for sure. You are indeed being toxic.
Butbut… “gEt BeNt YoU bElLeNd” though
And why, dare I ask, should the French form of the suffix be prioritized over the Greek? Latin actually used the Z when the suffix was borrowed from Greek. In French, the letter Z essentially didn’t exist, as even in Latin it was (nearly?) exclusively used for Greek loans. As French evolved from vulgar and unwritten Latin, the Z was replaced by S, which is pronounced as /z/ when between vowels anyway.
So again, why exactly must English hold the etymologically corrupted French form above the actual original one?
It’s not about what must be done. It’s about what has been done. Language isn’t about how things should have been. One person rarely gets much of a say in how language will develop. If you try to hold language up to best possible practices, you will be disappointed by the actual outcome every time.
Well, in the spirit of what has been done, -ize has been standardized in American English, and so here we are.
What a worthless comment
I mean, the irony here is quite strong even you must sense it.
Elon Musk says he refused to give Kyiv access to his Starlink communications network over Crimea to avoid complicity in a “major act of war”.
So, in the classic trolley problem, Elon’s choice is to remove the track switch that his company produced so that no one else could use it to make a choice.
“Sorry, guys. Looks like those innocent civilians tied to the tracks are going to have to die so that I am not tangentially and tenuously responsible for your choice to save them in exchange for the deaths of Russian soldiers attacking your sovereign lands and people (cough and lose money from the Kremlin as a result cough)”
There’s no “right” answer to the trolley problem. But there are definitely wrong ones.
Musk is the kid in the video that moves all the people to just one of the tracks, gets praised by everyone for thinking outside the box, and then proceeds to run the trolley down that track.
If you choose not to decide. You still have made a choice.
I love Rush
His logic seems to be that Ukraine is to blame for all the bloodshed of the Russian invasion because they didn’t roll over and surrender without a fight.
Victim blaming. Classic asshole move.
Did Elon have a stroke at some point that we don’t know about? It’s amazing how consistently he makes a huge ass of himself now.
One of his kids came out as trans, his partner left him and later dated a trans woman, and he got caught trying to give one of his employees a horse for sex, so he decided to join the political side that hates trans people and doesn’t hold people accountable for being shit as long as they continue waving the banner.
His midlife crisis needs to get the fuck out of my sight.
He is the Most Divorced Man in the World. And Grimes wasn’t even married to him!
Grimes really said “not even if you’re the richest man alive” and it’s driving him crazy
That I don’t think is his logic
He’s said about that - Ukraine should negotiate with the Russians and give them territory because war is so killy.
There’s no “right” answer to the trolley problem. But there are definitely wrong ones.
That depends on your moral basis.
Fair enough. My moral basis says that using my personal power and authority to undermine deals that I specifically sought to make in the first place, upon which others are dependent for literal survival, in order to backpedal my involvement in their survival attempts which I knew from the beginning was the entire point of the deal, the result of which directly and predictably leads to the deaths of hundreds/thousands of innocents… I consider that a moral failing. How about you?
This is the same bullshit take propagandists and Musk himself are spreading.
Musk sabotaged an active military operation in an effort to save Russian assets and materials, by disabling access to Starlink in that area, to halt the operation. And then refused to undo what he did.
All to protect Russian assets in an illegal undeclared war of annexation where Russia is the aggressor.
Musks actions enabled the death of thousands of civilians in Ukraine and likely will cause far more through his actions which extend how long this illegal invasion will continue.
Musk should be stripped of his US citizenship and booted right back to South Africa. America stands by Ukraine, South Africa tries to pretend they are neutral but the agreements they have with Russia and the opinions of rich fuck South Africans like Musk make it clear they stand with Russia.
And anyone who keeps spreading these press releases with his propagandist take on the subject rather than saying how things actually happened, should be ashamed of themselves and monitored until all this is over.
He should be charged with treason or something similar for doing this during wartime to a US ally. Enough of this narcissistic POS.
Yeah the Logan Act is what they could charge him under.
People always mention Elon doing so and so against a NATO ally and therefore it’s treason without ever mentioning the inverse which is Elon aided a war crime for a country who is a direct enemy of the US, which is the real treasonous crime imo.
Private citizens don’t get to make those decisions.
It’s time to nationalize Starlink & SpaceX.
Jesus. It says it all.
Lol…he switched it off as a personal favor to Putin.
It was never turned on in the first place. Read the article, not the clickbait headlines that have circulated (this one is on point though, credit to BBC)
Pretty sure putin owns musk.
LOL self-defense is escalation now
Why ISPs need to be neutral. Musk was never elected or appoints be a general. Otis not his place to decide what strikes happen or not. The blood of the people those ships have attacked are now on his hands.
From my understanding, he didn’t pull the rug, instead he just never turned on satellites that he never said he would turn on
He did in fact “pull the rug”
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
Musk is really speed running having his LEO satelites nationalized
Now there’s a great idea. Especially since he never would have built SoaceX without so much public support via NASA.
Get fucked, you boot licking weasel.
Fuck Musk with a grenade.
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“Moral idiocy” is a great way to sum it up
Musk saw a bully go over and punch a kid. So Musk ran over and held the kid’s hands behind him. Because punching back would have just escalated things.
How is this not like….illegal
It would be illegal in any other country on earth.
Because he’s a private business owner in a country that is not involved in the war.
You don’t have to agree with his choice, at all, but that’s why it isn’t illegal.
The problem with your point is that he knew to whom and for what he was offering the starlink services. If someone goes to a gun store and tells you they need a gun to shoot their neighbor, you can’t complain that they killed their neighbor with the gun you sold them.
They still have Starlink service. Just not in Crimea - which is currently (imo illegally) Russian territory.
I know, I’m just refuting this ridiculous rhetoric that it would be complicit in acts of war by offering a service that has no direct action in the attacks, starlink is as complicit as the sea itself, since the drones are sailing on it. By that logic, Audi would be complicit in a hit-and-run. And as the provider of a service, which he knew the purpose of, he becomes complicit when he decides which attacks can or cannot take place using its service, he is literally making war decisions.
I don’t disagree, with the caveat that Musk is explicitly not giving the Russian gov access to Starlink (though they do not require it)
I suspect that the reason for him not supplying russia is much simpler, there are sanctions against russia by the US and I doubt that he will be able to get paid for the service legally, and he knows that if he does this his image will be obliterated.
