Vladimir Putin on Tuesday called South African billionaire Elon Musk an “outstanding person” and an “active and talented” businessman, Izvestia reported on the Russian president’s comments at the Eastern Economic Forum.

“From the point of view of private business, Elon Musk is certainly a wonderful person, an active, talented businessman. He does a lot, including with the support of the American state,” said the head of the Kremlin.

But he added that Russia also has “excellent skills” in space and that Roscosmos, Moscow’s aerospace agency, has already decided to attract private investors to the sector, which until now has only been supported by the Russian state.

Regarding the failure of the Luna-25 mission last month, Putin stressed that it “was difficult” but that this did not mean that Russia’s efforts to successfully send a probe to the moon would be stopped.

The 8th Eastern Economic Forum is being held in Vladivostok on September 10-13, at which Putin is expected to meet with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in the Russian Far East in the coming days.

Putin praises Musk after new controversial information about the billionaire emerged

The Kremlin leader’s comments came after CNN reported last week that Musk prevented a Ukrainian attack on the Sevastopol naval base last year by disabling the Starlink system. This information will be included in his upcoming biography Elon Musk, written by American journalist and author Walter Isaacson, who wrote it in collaboration with the billionaire.

According to CNN, which obtained a copy of the book before it hits bookstores this month, Isaacson notes that Musk secretly ordered his engineers to shut down the Starlink satellite communications network off the coast of Crimea to thwart a Ukrainian attack using 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, in September of last year, Russian passers-by discovered a marine drone of unknown origin on the coast of Sevastopol, although it is not yet clear whether it is connected with the attack described in the book.

In an intervention on Twitter a day after the information emerged, Musk denied it, saying that the Starlink system was not active in the area anyway, and that he had effectively refused the authorities’ request to activate it to attack Russian naval forces. base.

Musk says he turned down a request from “the authorities” to activate Starlink over Crimea

“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.

Although he activated the Starlink system for Ukraine in the early days of the Russian invasion, the South African billionaire has since been at the center of several controversies over comments about a war started by Vladimir Putin and threats to shut down SpaceX’s satellite internet system. , which played a decisive role for the Ukrainian army.

Perhaps, Musk’s most controversial statements came in October of this year, when the billionaire suggested that Ukraine give up Crimea as part of a “peace plan” that he presented to his tens of millions of followers on Twitter.

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