In a war where drones are as crucial as ammunition, cutting Internet access is the equivalent of cutting supply lines. And that was exactly what, according to a new and explosive report by Reuters, made Elon Musk in Ukraine at the end of September 2022, paralyzing a key counteroffensive against Russian troops.
It was not a technical failure, nor a Russian cyber attack. According to the agency, it was a direct order of the Musk itself that left the Ukrainian troops blind and showed that the richest man in the world has the power to change the course of a war from his office in California, thousands of kilometers away from the front.
The story, which contradicts the public statements of the businessman, is based on the testimony of three people who know the decision of Elon Musk. The first direct proof that the tycoon interfered in the Ukraine War since Walter Isaacson told a similar case in his biography and then rectify. But the incident goes far beyond past controversies and places the tycoon in an unprecedented geopolitical power position for a particular citizen.
A deliberate blackout in the front of Jersón. The events occurred during a key counteroffensive of the Ukrainian army to recover the strategic region of Jersón. The Ukrainian troops advanced and depended almost completely on the Starlink terminals for everything: coordinate attacks, point the long -range artillery and pilot the surveillance drones that gave them eyes on the Russian positions.
It was then that Elon Musk gave the order to a Spacex engineer, Michael Nicolls, to cut the coverage in the counterattack areas. According to one of the sources, the order was blunt: “We have to do it.” In the Spacex offices, employees complied, seeing how a hundred hexagonal cells that represented Starlink’s coverage on the company’s internal map were turned off.
The impact on the front was devastating. The communications were suddenly cut and the surveillance drones were left without a sign, leaving the isolated and vision units on the enemy forces. Artillery units, which are used for the precise geolocation of objectives, began to fail in their shots. The soldiers panic.
According to a Ukrainian officer, the attempt to surround a Russian position in the city of Berislav failed after the blackout. Although Ukraine managed to release the area, Musk’s decision temporarily redrawed the front line.
Walter Isaacson’s biography fell short. This new report on Jersón is more serious than the most famous controversy to date: the Crimea incident. In September 2023, Walter Isaacson published his biography of Elon Musk telling that the tycoon had ordered to turn off the Starlink connectivity in Crimea to frustrate a Ukrainian attack with submarine drones against the Russian fleet in Sevastopol.
That statement caused a media earthquake, but was withdrawn by Isaacson himself in subsequent editions of the biography. According to Musk, what happened was actually that Ukraine had requested emergency activate Starlink’s coverage on Crimea, an area where he was not operational. Musk refused. His reasoning, expressed in several publications in X, was clear: doing so would have turned Spacex an accomplice of an act of war, violating the law.
So why did you interfere in Jersón? Reuters research points to a reason that the tycoon himself has expressed on other occasions: the fear that Ukrainian advances will cause nuclear retaliation by Russia. At that time, Vladimir Putin had threatened to use nuclear weapons if Russia’s “territorial integrity” was compromised.
This fear, which according to the report was shared by senior US officials, seems to have been the trigger for Musk to decide that the Ukrainian counteroffensive had gone too far. In his biography, Isaacson collected this kind of existential anguish: “How am I in this war? Starlink was not conceived to be involved in wars. It was for people to see Netflix and relax, not for drone attacks.”
The Ukrainian dependence of Starlink. “One of the main factors for which Ukraine was not overwhelmed by Russia is Starlink’s support that I provided, with great risk to spacex of cyber attacks and physical attacks by Russian military forces,” Musk wrote in the late 2024. “Starlink is the backbone of Ukrainian military communications in the front.”
Starlink is a constellation of thousands of satellites, much more difficult to block through interference than other satellite internet services. It also offers much larger bandwidth and latency much lower than other operators. This technological superiority has not only been crucial for Ukraine, but has given Elon Musk, the owner of Spacex (which is still a private company) an unprecedented power.
Image | The White House
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