According to
Bloomberg
September 8, 2023 at 9:49 AM EDT
@mrstime and
@Pepper ...Elon Musk last year curtailed his Starlink satellite service to prevent Ukraine using it for a sea-drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet in Crimea.
He worried the move could become a mini-Pearl Harbor and even trigger nuclear retaliation. “How am I in this war?’’
It was a good question and has a
simple answer: Musk is in this war because he did the right thing 19 months ago. When Russia invaded its neighbor in February 2022, one of the advancing military’s first moves was to neutralize the Ukrainian army’s communications system. The government in Kyiv turned to the world’s richest human because he was probably the only man on the planet capable of providing a solution at the speed and scale that was needed.
Musk is by now such a politically polarizing figure that
he doesn’t always get the credit he deserves for stepping up then, or for the way he followed through on his Starlink donations to make the civilian system workable in conditions of war. Without his satellites and batteries, the course of Ukraine’s fight for survival might have been very different.
None of that, however, makes Musk a foreign policy genius, a shrewd diplomat, or the right person to be making battlefield decisions for Ukraine. He has corrected one aspect of the episode’s account by Isaacson: Musk said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that he didn’t cut Starlink’s service, as described, but rather refused a request to extend it to Crimea for the attack.
The Pearl Harbor analogy, like so many made about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is clearly misguided. Japan’s surprise 1941 attack on the US fleet in Hawaii started a war where there was none. Ukraine was planning to hit the Russian fleet harbored in Crimea seven months after being invaded – not to mention that Crimea itself was occupied Ukrainian territory. As Mykhailo Podolyak, a de facto spokesman for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said in a
tweet after the book’s revelations, the ships targeted had beenfiring cruise missiles on a nearly daily basis against cities across Ukraine.
Musk’s worry about escalation was well founded. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that Russia has responded by upping the tempo of long-range missile attacks when Ukraine has done things like sink the Moskva, once the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship, or damage the Kerch bridge that connects Crimea to mainland Russia – a pet project of President Vladimir Putin. At this level, whether to risk retaliation should surely be a calculation for the Ukrainians to make.
