The tycoon Elon Musk prevented a Ukrainian attack on a Russian navy base in the Black Sea last year by rejecting Kiev’s request to enable Internet access with the Starlink satellite.
«We received an urgent request from government authorities to activate Starlink up to Sevastopol. The clear intent was to sink the majority of the moored Russian fleet” Musk posted on X. Internet service with the Starlink satellite, operated by Musk’s company SpaceX, was deployed in Ukraine shortly before it was invaded by Russia in February 2022. «If I had accepted the request, SpaceX would have been clearly complicit in a serious act of war and an escalation of the conflict» added Musk regarding an excerpt from his biography written by Walter Isaacson. In the piece anticipated by the Washington Post, Isaacson writes that in September 2022 the Ukrainian armed forces attempted an attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol by sending six small underwater drones loaded with explosives, relying on the use of Starlink to guide them to the target.
Isaacson adds that the tycoon spoke with the Russian ambassador to the United States, who “told him clearly that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would provoke a nuclear response.” Then, according to the biographer, Musk «secretly told his engineers to deactivate the coverage within a radius of one hundred kilometers from the Crimean coast. When the Ukrainian drones approached the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connection and misfired safely.”