Elon Musk says he prevented a Ukrainian attack on a Russian naval base last year rejecting Kiev’s request to enable internet access to the Black Sea in the region of Moscow-annexed Ukrainian Crimea through the Starlink network.

“We received an urgent request from government authorities cfor the activation of Starlink up to Sevastopol. The obvious goal was to sink most of the Russian fleet stationed there,” Musk wrote on Twitter (X).

Internet service via Starlink, operated by Musk-owned SpaceX, was deployed in Ukraine shortly after the February 2022 Russian invasion.

Sevastopol hosts the naval base of the Russian fleet on the Black Sea.

“If I had accepted their request, then SpaceX would be clearly complicit in a major war and escalation of the conflict“, declares.

Musk responded by posting an excerpt of his upcoming biography signed by Walter Isaacson.

In the excerpt published in the Washington Post, Isaacson writes that in September 2022, “the Ukrainian military was conducting a covert attack against the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, sending six small underwater drones packed with explosives, using Starlink to guide them to the target.

Isaacson points out that Musk had then spoken to “the Russian ambassador to the US… who had assured him in no uncertain terms that a Ukrainian attack on Crimea would trigger a nuclear response.”

According to Isaacson, Musk “he secretly told his engineers to disable area coverage within a 100km radius of the Crimean coast. When the Ukrainian drones approached the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost contact and sank without danger.”