“Musk committed evil,” leading Zelensky aide

Mikhail Podoliak has reacted angrily to rumours that the billionaire stopped Kiev from using Starlink satellites to attack Crimea.

According to Mikhail Podoliak, a top advisor to President Vladimir Zelensky, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk “committed” and “enabled evil” by forbidding a Ukrainian drone attack on Crimea last year. Musk claims that assisting Kiev in carrying out the attack would have amounted to his company “complicit in a major act of war.”

On Thursday, Podoliak said on Musk’s X (previously Twitter) platform that “sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake.”

He went on to say that Musk “allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities by not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via Starlink interference.”

Children and civilians are dying as a result. This is what you pay for mixing stupidity with a large ego. But the question still stands: why do some individuals want to so fervently support murderous war criminals? Do they now understand that they are supporting and committing evil?

In an effort to give citizens access to the internet and communications, SpaceX has supplied more than 20,000 Starlink terminals to Kiev since February 2022. The terminals were quickly turned into weapons, though. According to a forthcoming biography of the billionaire, Musk instructed his engineers to shut down the service within 100 kilometres of the Russian peninsula when he learned that Ukrainian forces intended to use Starlink to direct six naval drones to attack Russia’s Black Sea Fleet on the Crimean coastline last year.

The drones “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” the study stated. Then, by texting Musk and describing the capabilities of the sea drones, Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mikhail Fedorov pleaded with Musk to restore the communication. By attacking Crimea, Ukraine “is now going too far and inviting strategic defeat,” according to Musk, who declined.

The millionaire provided a different version of events. He clarified why Starlink was never turned on close to Crimea in his posts on X.

According to what he wrote, “government authorities made an urgent request to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol.” “The clear objective was to scuttle the majority of the Russian fleet while it was at anchor. SpaceX would be openly involved in a significant act of war and conflict escalation if I had granted their request.

We don’t see pro-Russian propaganda on X (a.k.a. Twitter), says Musk
After the failed attack, Musk informed the Pentagon that he would stop giving Ukraine Starlink terminals. After facing criticism from Kiev and the US media, he quickly changed his mind, but since then he has persuaded Washington and the EU to contribute to some of their maintenance while restricting their usage close to Russia’s borders.

Kiev has frequently deployed drones to attack civilian targets in Russia, despite the fact that the attack in question purportedly had a military aim. The Crimean Bridge, which connects the peninsula with the Russian mainland, has been targeted on numerous occasions, most recently by a naval drone in July, which killed two civilians and injured a child and a vehicle bomb last year, which killed three civilians.