Starlink shutdown: Musk gave private correspondence with Deputy Prime Minister Fedorov to the biographer without permission
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The American billionaire, the founder of Tesla, SpaceX and the owner of X, Elon Musk, gave his biographer private messages from the Deputy Prime Minister – Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov without asking for permission.
It is reported Financial Times.
Fedorov told the FT that he was not aware that Walter Isaacson had received and published the message in Musk’s biography.
“It’s not very nice. I never demonstrated or talked about our correspondence in public,” Fedorov said.
In his book, Isaacson tells how Musk intervened to block Ukrainian military Starlink access to Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces. The intervention prevented a secret attack by Ukrainian naval drones on the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea.
Isaacson’s biography and related column in the Washington Post on Friday include a text message exchange in which Fedorov pleads with Musk to restore Starlink communication with Ukrainian forces.
Fedorov was shocked when the FT showed the Post article, but said that since the reports were a year old, their publication was unlikely to have any operational consequences.
After media reports in October last year about interruptions in the work of Starlink in Ukraine, Musk agreed to restore the work of Ukrainian forces operating near Russian ones.
Fedorov said that Musk himself told him that he had turned off Starlink service on the front lines in southeastern Ukraine when Fedorov asked him to actually turn on communications in Crimea and to the borders as of 1991.
“When I turned it on, I wrote that I turned it on again,” Fedorov added.
Fedorov, who has repeatedly publicly thanked Musk for providing the Starlink service, repeated his thanks.
“I think that if he hadn’t done it, it would have been a disaster, we simply wouldn’t have been able to fight like that if he hadn’t done it,” the minister said.
Fedorov acknowledged long and frequent text conversations with Musk after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The minister said that after Musk posted a message on Twitter that Fedorov perceived as pro-Russian, he wrote a text message to the billionaire.
“I explained to him that he is not right, that we are, as it were, fighting for our independence,” Fedorov added.
The newspaper notes that the temporary shutdown of Starlink took place at a crucial moment in Ukraine’s counter-offensive last fall, after the full restoration of control over the territory occupied by Russia in the Kharkiv region and the recapture of lands in the direction of Crimea.
We remind you:
Elon Musk reacted on information that he allegedly secretly ordered Starlink communications off the coast of Crimea to thwart a Ukrainian attack on the Russian navy in Sevastopol. The billionaire said that he did not turn off the Starlink satellite communication for drones, but refused to turn it on there at the request of Ukraine.
Previously, the CNN channel, which received a fragment of Musk’s biography written by the American journalist and writer Walter Isaacson, reportedthat in 2022 Musk allegedly secretly ordered Starlink communications near the coast of Crimea to be disrupted in order to thwart a Ukrainian attack on the Russian navy in Sevastopol.
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