Musk personally spoke with Putin and turned off Starlink for the Armed Forces of Ukraine – media
According to journalists, US Defense Department spokesman Colin Kahl learned last October that the billionaire had held talks with the Kremlin chief.
In a telephone conversation with Pentagon officials about providing satellite internet to the Ukrainian army, entrepreneur Elon Musk mentioned that he had personally spoken with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This is reported by the American weekly The New Yorker in its article “Elon Musk’s Shadow Regime”.
During a conversation with US Defense Department spokesman Colin Kahl in October last year, Musk spoke about his personal conversation with the Kremlin chief. The meeting with Kal was connected with the fact that the Ukrainian military suddenly lost Starlink connection on the Ukrainian territory that the Russians were trying to seize.
Kahl concluded that Musk was afraid that the provision of Starlink communications in Russia would be considered military assistance to Ukraine and was looking for opportunities to appease the Russian leadership.
“We are aware of the reach and interest in this area, and the department is working with Starlink. But given the critical importance of these systems, we are not releasing additional details on special capabilities, contracts, or partners at this time,” said Pentagon spokesman Jeff Jurgensen.
Earlier, in October of last year, Musk denied that he had personally spoken with Putin. In his post on Twitter (a social network he recently renamed X), the billionaire wrote that he spoke with Putin about a year and a half ago and that the topic of conversation was space.
The New Yorker article again stirred up a public outcry about the peace talks. Last year, Musk proposed his peace plan, which was praised in the Kremlin and criticized in Kyiv. Some time later, Ukrainian defenders began to report poor performance of Starlink, and Musk, for his part, threatened to stop funding the Armed Forces’ access to the service.
His company SpaceX offered the US government to pay for Starlink for Ukraine, but Musk later said he was changing his position and promised to fund the project for free. In June, the US Department of Defense announced a contract to provide Starlink to Ukraine.
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said that his former colleague, who is a member of the notional PayPal Mafia group, bought into Putin’s proposals for the war in Ukraine. At the beginning of the noughties, Hoffman and Musk worked on the creation of PayPal.
He recalled that during a press conference in Aspen last September, Musk said that Putin wanted peace and that he needed to negotiate with him.
Hoffman has previously criticized Musk, in particular, for his approach to artificial intelligence: he was allegedly going to create his own AI project, while in public he called for a pause in all AI developments.
