Ukrainian presidential adviser says deaths of civilians ‘the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego’
A senior Ukrainian official has accused Elon Musk of “committing evil” after a new biography revealed details about how the business magnate ordered his Starlink satellite communications network to be turned off near the Crimean coast last year to hobble a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships.
In a statement on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, which Musk owns, the Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote that Musk’s interference led to the deaths of civilians, calling them “the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego”.
“By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian fleet via Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, and children are being killed,” Podolyak wrote.
“Why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realise that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?”
Musk defended his decision, saying he did not want his SpaceX company to be “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation”.
CNN on Thursday quoted an excerpt from the biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which described how armed submarine drones were approaching a Russian fleet near the Crimean coast when they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly”.
The biography, due out on Tuesday, alleges Musk ordered Starlink engineers to turn off the service in the area of the attack because of his concern that Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea.
Musk, who is also the CEO of the Tesla electric car company and SpaceX rocket and spacecraft manufacturer, initially agreed to supply Starlink hardware to Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion disrupted Ukrainian communications. But he reportedly had second thoughts after Kyiv succeeded in repelling the initial Russian assault and began to counterattack.
Musk has previously been embroiled in a social media spat with Ukrainian officials including the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, over his ideas for ending Russia’s invasion.
In October last year, Musk proposed a peace deal involving re-running under UN supervision annexation referendums in Moscow-occupied Ukrainian regions, acknowledging Russian sovereignty over the Crimean peninsula and giving Ukraine a neutral status.
“Preliminary analysis suggests that the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2023, driven in particular by the dismantling of Twitter’s safety standards.
The EU has also accused Musk’s X of allowing Russian propaganda about Ukraine to spread on its website.
A study released last week by the European Commission, the governing body of the European Union, found that “the reach and influence of Kremlin-backed accounts has grown further in the first half of 2023.”
The study said that the increased reach of Russian propaganda online was “largely driven by Twitter, where engagement grew by 36% after CEO Elon Musk decided to lift mitigation measures on Kremlin-backed accounts”.
Musk on Friday attempted to refute the EU study, writing on his social media platform: “Where is all this pro-Russian propaganda? We don’t see it.”
archive: https://archive.ph/wip/ENe3P
Musk defended his decision, saying he did not want his SpaceX company to be “explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation”.
lol well you fucking failed bro because that’s exactly what happened.
Right?
The “escalation” was the invasion, Elon, you simpering pile of shit.
Removed by mod
NATO is a Russian asset confirmed
Damn you guys really didn’t like this joke huh
Removed by mod
Well yeah, it’s a defensive alliance. So it’s general policy is “do whatever you want, but if you attack a member we will seriously fuck you up!”
It’s situation where there’s no legal obligation for NATO to help (though there is a bit more of an obligation for the US help because of separate treaty with Ukraine in the 90s) but there is a moral obligation to help. And of course it’s in the national interest of the members of NATO to help, which is what matters. So NATO’s stance of not wanting to escalate the war is understandable. They will help but don’t want to be drawn into direct combat which is what they mean when they say “escalation.”
But Elon Musk is not really supposed to be a player on the international stage. If the Pentagon or NATO requested him to disable Starlink to disrupt an op, ok they’re the ones that will have to deal with whatever fallout there is from doing or not doing anything like that. But Elon Musk is an impulsive idiot and shouldn’t be in a position to make these kinds of decisions.
Removed by mod
Which countries did NATO invade again? There’s the operations after the break-up of Yugoslavia but that was largely a Peacekeeping operation. Do you consider that to be an invasion?
Afghanistan was most certainly an invasion. That happened because one of NATO’s members (US) was attacked. Yes NATO will invade countries when a member has been attacked.
Sure there’s no-fly zones and some airstrikes conducted by NATO, but in terms of outright invasions, it’s just Afghanistan which was in response to a member being attacked. Because it’s a defensive alliance.
Giving a bunch of them to Ukraine as a marketing tactic… wasn’t being explicitly complicit in a major act of war?
Where is the line at? Space?
I call bullshit. He sold them fucking internet as a fucking contract with the damn Pentagon. What else would they be used for. If you wanted to use that excuse then you should’ve never made the contract. This was planned from the start. He sold the contract to have greater control over their military operations. This is just the first of a long line of items to come
He sold them fucking internet as a fucking contract with the damn Pentagon.
Sounds an awful lot like Elon Musk defrauded the Pentagon.
Sounds an awful lot like elon musk needs to be sent to the Russian front his fucking self. I hope ukraine charges him as a Russian spy and puts out a bounty on him.
I’m okay with this. They’ll pull him out and try to get secrets from him… Only to realize he knows literally nothing about rockets and electric cars. Then he’ll get thrown back onto the front line.
Sounds kinda like somebody is playing both sides and needs a strong reminder as to what hand feeds him.
Yep. With something like this you’re either all in or all out. You don’t half-ass military support.
Turns out if you’re rich enough, you get to try out the trolly problem in real life and then brag about it in your biography.
That needs to be the meme that goes around.
If he did it to the US while we were at war we would call it treason.
Instead he merely did it to a strong US ally to benefit a long-time US adversary. An adversary we have practically as many sanctions on as is feasible before it becomes a declaration of war.
I don’t know what crime this is. Logan Act violation? But at this point Starlink is being used as a strategic asset in a US ally’s war and should be seized by the US government as a military asset.
I’m sure that DOD lawyers are taring through the contract they signed with him. But, since the dumb SOB admitted to it, if the contract doesn’t have a provision to let him do this they can sue him under carriage laws. Ending with the government taking away his operating license and siezing his operating network. The DOD has been wanting to create their own such network in any case.
Just asking, does anybody still like this cunt?
Sadly, he has a bunch of dedicated fanboys on his precious website.
They’re all over reddit too. There’s nothing more pathetic than witnessing a thread get brigaded by a bunch of Muskrats. Imagine living vicariously though the immature twitter antics of a white supremacist billionaire. They’re clowns.
Other dumb cunts do, but not as many as before
The general public does. Check out YouTube’s front page while you’re logged out sometime. At any given moment, you’ll more than likely find at least one video full of simps singing their praises to Musk in the comments. The title is usually something like “Elon’s brilliant new idea will make such and such obsolete!”. It’s disgusting how many people see him as genius who can do no wrong.
Half ruzzian/RW botnets, half morons.
Elon Musk is skirting with making StarLink one of the first nationalized companies in the US in a long time. Lets hope its a domino for all ISPs.
jk i hear spectrum and at&t are merging to one company to be called “lmao, get fucked america”
If you want to take his technology to wage foreign wars then do it.
If you’d rather just rely on a private citizens to provide vital military infrastructure to your allies then deal with the fact that private citizens are prone to such behaviors as acting in their own best interest.
What? Do you think Ratheon gets to dictate who’s children we kill with their bombs?
That’s a really awful comparison and not just because you misspelled Raytheon.
Go look up what a strawman argument is.
Not OP but I’d rather have our gov, who is bound by certain rules and regs and SHOULD be serving the people, operate this than one person who only has his own interests in mind.
1 billionaire shouldn’t be able to control the world.
Just think of how much money was saved by letting Musk provide vital defense infrastructure for free.
Sure, Musk is a piece of shit, but when you don’t want to pay for a babysitter and a deranged cannibal offers to watch your child for free, is it really entirely the cannibals fault when he eats your baby despite him totally promising not to.
The Air Force said in its contract justification document, cited in the reports, that the deal involves Starlink supporting US military bases in Europe and Africa with fixed-site and portable satellite internet services.
The contract was for US military bases, not for facilitating offensive strikes. So this was expected au gratis.
by letting Musk provide vital defense infrastructure for free.
He’s not providing it for free. You clearly don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
Article is pretty clear about it being for US military bases, not offensive operations. Which is a very significant restriction.
Initially it was offered without cost as humanitarian aid. When they expanded on the use of it to include military operations, Elon (rightfully) attached a price tag to it. When they wanted to use outside of the scope of the services they contracted it for Elon said no. Once again another reason infrastructure shouldn’t be provided by private citizens.
The timing is the issue. If Musk had disallowed use of Starlink for drone control from the start, then that’s one thing.
If he had notified the Ukraine Armed forces that he was going to do it ahead of time, that would have been best.
However, he ordered that their access be disrupted while an attack on the Russian Navy was going to take place. Meaning Starlink access was cut just at the worst time and caused the drones to simply wash ashore.
That same Navy has been causing thousands of civilian casualties.
How Musk knew Ukraine was going to launch an attack but hadn’t hit their targets yet is another concerning fact.
CNN on Thursday quoted an excerpt from the biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which described how armed submarine drones were approaching a Russian fleet near the Crimean coast when they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly”.
The biography, due out on Tuesday, alleges Musk ordered Starlink engineers to turn off the service in the area of the attack because of his concern that Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea.
It would be the difference between GM shutting down your car remotely when it’s parked after sending you notice vs GM shutting off your car when you’re at highway speeds and taking an exit.
putin ballhandler chose to fuck over ukraine?
what he really wants is to slide into Putin’s seat, and play the whole world the same way Vlad does
Man, I hope he tries that and moves to Moscow. The oligarchs would eat him alive and it would be some prime schadenfreude to watch.
would he have to even visit Moscow though… i don’t see Putin doing much in public anyplace… where the hell does he hide all day… and what makes you think Putin is brave enough to show himself in front of oligarchs…
Ukraine. Southeast Montana. Doesn’t matter.
Aiding and abetting governments hostile to the US and its allies is treason. Musk is a fraud, a traitor and deserves to be imprisoned.
Southeast Montana?
My gods just shoot the man already so we can stop hearing about him.
there should be a bounty on the fucker
The bounty wouldn’t even have to be money, at this point if you promised to give people twitter back instead, you’d still get interested parties.
Give Ukraine a few more hours it may just happen
How is he not like a rouge nation unto himself at this point? He’s deciding the outcome of international conflicts. We are truly an oligarchy.
Rogue.
Rouge nation is an excellent name for a make-up company that specialises in red/pink cosmetics.
I stand corrected. But, dibs on Rouge Nation!
Rouge is also the term for any kind of face powder regardless of the colour. So yeah it would be a great name for a cosmetics company.
Nationalize StarLink.
People keep saying that, which only sounds like a good idea if you know nothing about it besides it internet
It’s a shit ton of cheap satellites that cause more issues than provide benefit
Removed by mod
No, we should stop filling up our orbit with an insane number of junk satellites…
There’s better ways to provide internet to isolated areas, and just the starlink satellites on their own is effecting a lot of shit. And it’s going to get worse as time goes by and they all break
I was under the impression that Starlink satellites are orbiting too low to meaningfully contribute to Kessler syndrome, since their orbital decay time is 5 years. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like starlink either, I just don’t know of any long term consequences
So what you’re saying is taxpayers are already on the hook for when the cheap shit breaks since Musk is king of government subsidies. So why wouldn’t we nationalize it so we get the benefits too.
Oh no see he prevented Moscow nuking Ukraine by doing this. What a hero! /s
I can’t believe we live in this society of appeasers. Him and the Republicans. I remember a time when Republicans accused Democrats of not being able to stand up to dictators, and now they are full throttle.
It’s always projection, every accusation is an admission.
I remember the last time we tried appeasement on a belligerent authoritarian state. It worked so well in the end, didn’t it?
Ukraine is so obviously the sudetenland.
Peace for our time!
I’m generally anti-war, but with this thing, there’s no choice. If Ukraine wins, the war is over. If Russia wins, there will be even more war to come.
he took sides and engaged in a military conflict, there’s no other way to see it… he doesn’t have that authority, no matter what technology his little company controls…
He doesn’t the authority only if someone does something about it. Only time will tell if the US or Ukraine does anything.
If they “Put him on notice” then yes he does have that authority, and we have only ourselves to blame.
I can’t be the only person who wondered “what’s his real motive” when he volunteered these for free, knowing much of what he is known for. I guess people he’s visited in DC have benefitted as well, because surely they knew this wouldn’t go well, right?
Elon Musk is an attention starved and has the mentality of an impulsive spoiled child. Slava Ukraini was trending, so he wanted to insert himself into it to get attention. Probably thought Ukraine would lose so he gets a little attention for trying to help these guys fighting the good fight before they were ultimately crushed by Russia.
But that didn’t happen. Ukraine continues on and what he thought of as a little in the moment publicity stunt obligated him to helping Ukraine. While most people would happy with the result, but scared little child Elon Musk felt he was in over his head. And being the impulsive child he is, started doing impulsive shit and interfered in an active military conflict, compromising an ally’s mission.
It’s hard to say how much DC is in the know. It is a new tech, glitches happen, so they might not have suspected Musk was the glitch in the system.
I was talking about this with someone today, and pondering what would happen if a private Ukrainian citizen had decided to deliberately fuck up an American military action, and what the American response would be.
The closest I could think of was Julian Assange, a non-US citizen who leaked a bunch of US military info and probably somewhat fucked up whatever they were up to at the time, or at least drew more attention to it than they would have liked. They’re currently trying to extradite him to the US for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” and who knows what they’ll do to him when that inevitably gets pushed through. I guess Chelsea Manning’s treatment is probably some indicator for that too.
So anyway, I expect Elon Musk will probably be extradited to Ukraine and spend a year or so in solitary confinement there right away. Maybe hide in an embassy for a few years first?
