South African billionaire Elon Musk has denied reports that he shut down the Starlink satellite internet system in Crimea to prevent a Ukrainian attack on a Russian naval base there, offering another explanation for what happened.

“These regions have not been activated for Starlink. Starlink has not turned anything off,” he wrote on Twitter, the social network he bought last October and recently renamed X.

He said this after one of the users of the platform asked him to “answer” if he “prevented a nuclear war”.

Musk offered further clarification after being told that the information, first released by CNN on Thursday, was contained in a biography of him that American journalist and author Walter Isaacson wrote in collaboration with him.

“There was an urgent request from the authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intention was to sink most of the Russian fleet stationed here. If I agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be a direct complicit in a large-scale war and escalation of the conflict,” said Elon Musk.

He did not specify whether the “authorities” are Ukrainian or American.

Then the South African billionaire issued a new call for peace.

“Both sides must agree to a truce. Every day, more and more young Ukrainians and Russians go to die in order to conquer small pieces of land, the borders of which barely change. It is not worth their lives,” he wrote.

Elon Musk is at the center of a new controversy related to the war in Ukraine

Walter Isaacson, in a book he co-authored with the billionaire, notes that in 2022, Musk secretly ordered his engineers to shut down the Starlink satellite communications network off the coast of Crimea to prevent a Ukrainian attack on the Russian fleet in Sevastopol with the help of naval drones.

According to the journalist, Ukrainian drones loaded with explosives “came close to the Russian fleet”, but then “landed harmlessly on the shore”. By the way, last September on the coast of Sevastopol, Russian passers-by discovered a marine drone of unknown origin.

Isaacson writes that Musk’s decision was motivated by fears of Russian retaliation, as the billionaire believed Moscow might perceive the attack as a “mini Pearl Harbor,” according to CNN, which obtained a copy of the book before it hit bookstores. It should go on sale later this month.

It is reported that the head of SpaceX spoke with Russian officials and after these conversations was sure that Russia could use nuclear weapons in such a situation. The biography quotes the billionaire as saying that the satellite network is not designed for conflict.

“Starlink was created so people could watch Netflix, relax, go online at school and do peaceful things, not drone attacks,” the book says.

By the way, in February of this year, SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace company, announced that it had banned Kyiv from using the Starlink system for military operations, a move strongly criticized by Ukraine, as the satellite internet system was vital to the military, especially in the early months of the war.

But SpaceX dropped its objections a few months after the Pentagon agreed to pay for Ukraine to use the service, as Musk requested back in October 2022.

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