“Not a single Starlink was sold to Russia.” Elon Musk denied the information that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia, which are used by the military in Ukraine

by ua-stena

29 comments

  1. That’s actually good news, as if they’ve found their way into Russian hands illicitly then presumably through pressure or sanction the US govt should be able to get them switched off or tapped or whatever.

  2. I don’t think the point was ever that SpaceX was selling them, there was a middleman for that. So i’m sure technically he’s right… but that doesn’t mean they’re not being used in RU.. :/

  4. still not answering the straightforward question. Is Starlink being used in Ukraine occupied territories?

  5. So he isn’t lying if they gave them to Russia for free.

  7. Then Musk should have no problem disabling the units clearly in russian posession.

  9. “Elon, you have disabled Starlink for Ukraine’s military but have activated it for Russia’s military. What is up with that.”

    “Not a single Starlink was sold to Russia.”

    “… That is not what anyone is wondering about.”

    “I am not personally involved in the invasion of Ukraine.”

    “No one is wondering if you are, Elon. Instead we are all wondering why you deliberately enabled the use of Starlink to aid Russia’s invasion, while disabling it to hinder Ukraine’s defense.”

    “Starlink headquarters is in Dubai, not Moscow.”

    “Elon are you just making disconnected statements in order to evade accountability for these decisions favoring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?”

    “Hyperloop could have worked you know.”

    “…”

  10. So he wouldn’t mind giving the precise gps location of all units being used in the occupied territories to Ukraine

  11. That doesn’t mean he didn’t sell them to Kyrgyzstan…

  12. I wonder if there is a “useful permissiveness” here.

    I don’t necessarily fault starlink for the terminals winding up in Russian hands; by all accounts the Russians obtained them illicitly from sources in the UAE to which Starlink sold terminals in good faith, and in the absence of sanctions.

    That said, we know that starlink can absolutely disable them (as we saw with disabling the transceivers on Ukrainian USVs near Sevastopol). So why haven’t they? The argument is that Musk is chasing the money, but there seems to be at most a couple hundred terminals in use (and most likely a few dozen) by the Russians, contrasted with the 3 billion dollars or so of US government contracts held by Musk’s various companies which would be at risk from sanctions violations.

    There’s also the question of why Russia is using them, considering they have their own proprietary military data and communication networks, Internet, and GPS systems. If they’re using a Western civilian Internet terminal, then it’s likely to overcome significant limitations in those systems.

    In aggregate, I wouldn’t be surprised if the US and ukrainian governments were allowing our even encouraging starlink use; I 100% believe they’re being monitored for intelligence, and evaluated from a meta standpoint to see when and how the terminals are being used, which would illustrate useful information about the limitations of the Russian proprietary systems (ie, what can starlink do that their systems can’t?).

    In the end, it might be a repeat of what happened when the ukrainian government kept the civilian cell towers operational during the initial invasion, which the invaders used due to lack of working radios: the Russians might tip their hand more often than they derive a benefit.

    It’ll be interesting to see the outcome. Ukrainians are exceedingly clever with exploiting stuff like this, and I think they are likely to make this apparent threat into an asset.

  14. I keep saying it because I feel a lot of non-Americans or even some Americans who never had experience with the DoD keep assuming.

    If there are units in the occupied territories, they are either stolen or some other 3rd party way of circumventing, or maybe even Ukarian units deep inside the territory.

    It’s that simple for us as viewers. No Elon is playing both sides. You do not mess with the DoD when having a defense contract by selling to both sides. That is a surefire way to have Homeland Security busted down your company doors.

  15. Directly to Russia I imagine he means. Which yeah, that’s sorta expected. However, stopping another nation SpaceX sells Starlink to, say some random dude in Europe or whatever who then sells it again to someone in Russia is much more difficult. Realistically, it should be expected at least some Starlink terminals would make it over to Russia’s troops eventually as it’s almost impossible to completely stop smuggling and such. That being said, the real question is how Elon/SpaceX will respond to this and how much resources/effort they’ll put in to discerning which ID’s/specific ones Russia’s using and disabling them.

    Sure, SpaceX jumps at the moment and works to get them disabled rapidly I wouldn’t consider that much harm/foul. However, they drag their feet and that’s an entirely different situation.

  17. Lol idiot doesn’t understand the point of sanctions… yeah, cause there are sanctions… more sadistic oligarchic feigned ignorance. How did the terminals get there?

  22. “sold” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

  26. And Germany doesn’t sell to Russia, but they do sell to the khazaks, which have increased their exports to Russia 100x.

  28. His denial is an admission. I didn’t sell starlink to Russia. I gave them freely after I sucked Putin’s cock.

  29. So the several videos we’ve now seen of Starlink systems being downed over occupied terrorities must be in our imagination then.

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