An artillery division sends intel using a Starlink connection (Pierre Crom/Getty Images)

It was September 2022, and Kyiv was determined to attack the Russian naval fleet at the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Their plan was straightforward: guided by SpaceX’s Starlink satellite system, six drone submarines would sneak through Russia’s defences and detonate their explosives. Starlink, owned by Elon Musk, had been providing communications services to Ukraine since the start of the war; there was every reason to believe the mission would be a success.
Except it wasn’t. In a new biography, Walter Isaacson writes that Musk, concerned the attack would make Starlink complicit in a major act of war and potentially prompt an escalatory Russian response (perhaps even a nuclear one), decided to secretly switch off Starlink’s coverage of Crimea.
Musk has since dismissed these claims, pointing out that Crimea was not covered by Starlink in the first place because of US sanctions on Russia (which included Crimea); he simply refused to act upon an emergency request by the Ukrainian government for the connection to be turned on for what Musk described as “a Pearl Harbor-type attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol”. “Our terms of service clearly prohibit Starlink for offensive military action, as we are a civilian system, so they were asking for something that was expressly prohibited,” Musk said.
Isaacson subsequently admitted his mistake. His “revelation”, however, incorrect as it may have been, has nonetheless fuelled a frenzy of attacks directed at Musk. He was called “evil” by a high-level Ukrainian official and a “traitor” by American pro-war hawks. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said Musk was “intervening to try to stop Ukraine from winning the war”. CNN’s Jake Tapper called Musk a “capricious billionaire” who “effectively sabotaged a military operation by Ukraine, a US ally”. Senator Elizabeth Warren even called for an immediate congressional investigation into Starlink’s activities in Ukraine.
Such reactions were surprising for a number of reasons. Putting aside Musk’s remarkable support for Ukraine and the strictly legal argument for restraint — namely that Musk needed US presidential authorisation to activate Starlink over Crimea — they forget that his position on Russia’s Crimean “red line” was widely held at the time. Indeed, it was shared until recently by several American and Western experts and diplomats, including Biden’s own Secretary of State Antony Blinken. That the US administration has now pivoted on Crimea, and on Ukrainian attacks in Russian territory, does not change the fact that Musk’s view reflected the consensus last September. Nor, of course, does Russia’s reluctance to go nuclear, despite Ukraine recently carrying out a successful attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, exclude more serious forms of retaliation in the future, especially if Russia’s control of Crimea is threatened.
Even more important, recent criticisms of Musk obfuscate a more pressing issue: how did a private businessman come to play such a crucial role in this war in the first place?
In order to answer this question, we must return to February 24, 2022. Just one hour before the invasion, a hacker attack, quite obviously carried out by the Russians, put out of use thousands of modems connected to the American satellite company Viasat, which the Ukrainian government and military relied on for command and control of the country’s armed forces. This meant that, in the earliest hours of the invasion, Ukraine was largely deaf and blind, with very limited communication abilities.
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