With Starlink satellites, the course of the Ukraine war might have been very different. But now, an amateur military strategist is making life-and-death calls, says Marc Champion for Bloomberg Opinion.
in Crimea. He worried the move could become a mini-Pearl Harbour and even trigger nuclear retaliation.
Musk is by now such a politically polarising figure that he doesn’t always get the credit he deserves for stepping up then, or for the way he followed through on his Starlink donations to make the civilian system workable in conditions of war. Without his satellites and batteries, the course of Ukraine’s fight for survival might have been very different.None of that, however, makes Musk a foreign policy genius, a shrewd diplomat or the right person to be making battlefield decisions for Ukraine.
Ukraine was planning to hit the Russian fleet harbored in Crimea seven months after being invaded – not to mention that Crimea itself was occupied Ukrainian territory. As Mykhailo Podolyak, a de facto spokesman for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in a tweet after the book’s revelations, the ships targeted had been firing cruise missiles on a nearly daily basis against cities across Ukraine.Musk’s worry about escalation was well founded.
A little thought should have made him sceptical of that idea. Ukraine sank the Moskva in April 2022, just two months into the war. There was no nuclear response then, and there was no reason to believe hitting smaller ships would cause one in September 2022. For others more fearful of Russia’s nuclear potential, any attempt to retake Crimea represents a road to what Musk called Ukraine’s"strategic defeat".
Nothing tends to be nuanced when it comes to Musk, who revels in controversy and seems to get wackier with time. But when it comes to Starlink, the nuance is needed.
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