“We received an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink to Sevastopol” last year, which houses the base of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea, on the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Moscow in 2014, a indicated Elon Musk Thursday on X (ex-Twitter). “The obvious intention was to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he added.
Internet service via the Starlink satellite, operated by the company SpaceX, owned by Musk, was deployed in Ukraine shortly after its invasion by Russia in February 2022. This network, widely used by soldiers on the ground, is a key tool on the battlefield for Kiev. “If I had accepted their request, SpaceX would have been clearly complicit in a major act of war and an escalation of the conflict,” argued Elon Musk.