Voice of Ukraine

From Maia Mikhaluk in Kyiv (568th day):

When will the West stop being afraid of ruzzia losing the war?

‘Have Your Ignorance And Ego Cost Ukrainian Lives?’ Elon Musk was cornered by a reporter over war interference. Business Insider wrote about Elon Musk’s sabotage of Ukraine’s military action against ruzzian aggressors. Hundreds of lives could have been saved and the end of war could be closer if Musk didn’t try to play “god”:

“Ukraine successfully targeted the Russian navy in Crimea on Tuesday. It’s the same kind of strike Elon Musk sabotaged in 2022, fearing it’d cause nuclear war. But it appears Musk fell for a Russian bluff, say critics.

Flames engulfed Russian naval ships in a major dockyard in the occupied Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea on Tuesday after a Ukrainian missile attack. The attack was notable not just as another example of Ukraine’s capacity to strike Russia deep behind its front line but also, said critics, because it exposed the falsity of SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s reasons for scuppering a similar Ukrainian strike.

The SpaceX CEO last year effectively sabotaged a Ukrainian attack as drones were bearing down on Russian naval vessels in Sevastopol in the early weeks of the conflict, Walter Isaacson said in his new biography about the billionaire.

Musk decided to disable the Starlink satellites used to guide the drones, fearing the attack could be a new Pearl Harbour that would escalate the conflict and potentially invite a nuclear response from Russia, the biography said.

The incident was a startling indication of the power Musk wields and was the first time it had been said the billionaire directly intervened to prevent a military operation in the conflict.

What’s been notably absent in the wake of Tuesday’s strike is any sign of the massive escalation from Russia that Musk said he acted to prevent. In fact, there have been several attacks on Russian vessels in Sevastopol since the incident Isaacson describes, including an October 2022 attack using sea drones, which also didn’t provoke a massive Russian response.

Critics say Musk was played by Russia.
“This is a cautionary tale about the arrogance of a billionaire who has come to play a mercurial role in US foreign policy. But it’s also a story about fear, seeded and promoted by the Russians, deliberately designed to shape broader Western perceptions of this war,” wrote the historian Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic.

Putin even suggested when he declared the formal annexation of swaths of east Ukraine in October 2022 that an attack on the territory would be treated as an attack on Russia, suggesting the Kremlin could respond with a nuclear strike. Yet Ukraine has continued to attack the territory and even seized some of it back from Russia without triggering the nuclear response Putin threatened. Even Ukrainian attacks on Russia itself have not triggered a massive escalation from Russia.”

It’s time to stop being afraid of ruzzia losing this aggressive and unjust war. That’s the only way to safer world and it’s the only better path into the future for ruzzia.