Musk secretly communicates with Putin after the invasion of the Russian Federation into Ukraine - WSJ
Conversations, confirmed by several current and former American, European and Russian officials, affect personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions. WSJ writes about it. At some point, Putin asked the billionaire not to turn on his satellite online service Starlink over Taiwan as a service to Chinese leader Si Jinping, two people informed about requests reported.
This year Musk has become an important supporter of Donald Trump's election campaign and can find a place in the Trump administration in the event of his victory. While the United States and their allies have been Putin in recent years, the mask dialogue may signal the restoration of interaction with the Russian leader and strengthen Trump's desire to conclude an agreement on the main fault lines, such as war in Ukraine.
At the same time, these contacts also cause potential fears about national security among some members of the current administration, given the role of Putin as one of America's main opponents. Musk has established close business ties with US military and intelligence agencies, which gives it a unique opportunity to observe some of the most sensitive space programs of America. SpaceX, which manages the Starlink Service, won a secret contract for the amount of $ 1.
8 billion in 2021 and is the main missile launch installation for the Pentagon and NASA. The mask has admission to secret information. Information about the contacts of the Kremlin mask, apparently, is kept secret in the government. Several White House officials said they were not aware of them. The topic is very sensitive, given the growing involvement in Trump campaign and approaching the US presidential election, which has less than two weeks. Musk did not respond to requests of comments.
The billionaire was called Putin's apologette, he said it was an "absurd" and stated that his company "made more to blame Russia than anything else. " During his election campaign in Pennsylvania last week, Musk spoke about the importance of transparency of the government and emphasized his own access to state secrets. "I have admission to super -secret information, but I have to say, like most things I know about . . .
The reason they are keeping it in the harshest secret is that it is boring," Musk said. The Pentagon representative stated: "We do not comment on the admission to the secret information, the verification or status of any person, as well as the security policy. " One person familiar with conversations said the government is faced with a dilemma because it is very dependent on the billionaire technologies.
SpaceX launches vital national security satellites into orbit and is a company that NASA is entrusted with the delivery of astronauts to an international space station and back. "They don't like it," the insider said, referring to the contacts of Mask and Putin. However, this person said that the administration would not worry about possible safety violations from the mask.
The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the only Kremlin communication with the mask took place during one telephone conversation in which he and Putin discussed "Space, as well as current and future technologies". In addition, Peskov claims that neither Putin nor Kremlin officials have regular conversations with a mask. Musk has long been fascinated by Russia and its space and rocket programs.
The biography of the mask written by Walter Isaxon, says that a businessman traveled to Moscow in 2002 to negotiate a missile for his space program, which was just born but fainted during lunch with vodka. In the end, the deal failed, although Musk received a bottle of vodka with the image of Mars as a gift. Billionaire conversations with Putin and Kremlin officials emphasize his growing tendency to go beyond business and engage in geopolitics.
He met and talked about Mileya Argentina several times, as well as with the former President of Brazil Zhaiir Bolsonar, whom he defended in fierce online debates. Putin at a different level. The Russian leader has created an authoritarian system that oversees the falsification of the elections and murder of political opponents, for which President Biden called him "the killer.
" With the keys to one of the most powerful nuclear arsenals in the world and growing territorial ambitions in Europe, Putin became the main antagonist of the United States. Calling it "despot", the Ministry of Finance in 2022 made an unusual step, bringing it to the black list for invasion of Ukraine, putting it in one company with Kim Jong -in in North Korea, President of Syria Bashara Assad and Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus.
In October 2022, Musk publicly stated that he only talked to Putin once. He said on the air of X that the conversation was about space and that it happened in April 2021. But this was followed by new conversations, including other high -ranking Russian officials after 2022 and this year. One of the officials was Sergey Kiriyenko, the first deputy head of Putin's administration, two officials said. What they were talking about is unclear.
Last month, the US Department of Justice stated in a written statement that Kiriyenko had created about 30 Internet domains for the spread of Russian misinformation, including on the social network Mask X, where Russian propagandists had to undermine Ukraine's support and manipulate US voters on the eve of the presidential election. After the Russian invasion in February 2022, Ilon Musk initially made decisive public statements about Kiev support.
He posted the post "Hold on Ukraine" surrounded by Ukrainian flags on Twitter, which he did not belong to him then. Shortly thereafter, he jokingly summoned Putin to battle. He then gave Ukraine several hundred Starlink terminals free of charge. By July, about 15,000 terminals provided free access to the Internet in large territories of the country destroyed by Russian attacks. Later that year, the mask of conflict seems to have changed.
In September, the Ukrainian soldiers were unable to use Starlink terminals to bring marine drones to the Russian naval base in the Crimea, the Black Sea Peninsula, which Moscow has occupied since 2014. Ukraine tried to persuade the mask to activate the Starlink service in the area, but this did not happen. Its space company continued to limit the use of Starlink in the offensive operations of Ukraine.
Musk later said he went to this step because Starlink was intended for civilian purposes and that he believes that any attack of Ukraine on Crimea can provoke a nuclear war. His actions coincided with public and private pressure from the Kremlin. In May 2022, the head of the Space Office of Russia stated in his post on Telegram that Musk would "respond as an adult" for the supply of Starlink to the Ukrainian battalion "Azov".
Later, in 2022, Musk regularly communicated with "high -ranking Russians", according to the insider. At that time, the Kremlin put pressure on a business mask and "threatened" his business. At the same time, Musk was increasingly turning to Twitter, for which he completed the purchase to declare that SpaceX was losing money by financing the work of the terminals.
In October 2022, he asked tens of millions of his subscribers to vote on the path to peace, which reflected some aspects of the Kremlin's supply of Ukraine at that time. These conditions included the continuation of the Russian occupation of Crimea and the neutrality of Ukraine outside NATO. He also said that Ukraine should continue to allow water supply to Crimea, which was an important issue of the Kremlin before the war.
One current and one former source in intelligence reported that Musk and Putin continue to maintain contacts since then, as Musk began to strengthen his criticism of US military assistance to Ukraine and participated in Trump's election campaign. In the fall of 2022, political scientist Jan Bremmer, founder of the New York Consulting firm Eurasia Group, wrote on Twitter that Musk told him that he had told him with Putin and Kremlin officials about Ukraine.
"He also told me what the Kremlin's red lines are," he wrote. Bremmer wrote in the newsletter for subscribers that Musk had handed him a message from Putin that Russia would ensure the safety of Crimea and the Ukrainian neutrality "no matter what" and that it would respond to the invasion of Ukraine into Crimea by nuclear blow. Musk said "it is necessary to do everything to avoid this result," Bremmer wrote. Musk publicly denied that he was saying something from this bammer.
Last year, the interests of the mask and Russia were increasingly crossing. In addition to the use of Russia X for misinformation and frank counteraction to the mask of Kiev, Ukrainian officials have declared this year that Russian troops that occupy the eastern and southern regions of the country have begun to use Starlink to ensure a safe connection and increase the radius of their drones.
Russian troops also began to use the Starlink terminals, delivered through third countries, undermining one of the few advantages of Ukraine on the battlefield. Musk stated on the air that, as far as he knows, no terminal was sold directly or indirectly to Russia, and that the terminals would not work in Russia. Pentagon representatives said the military was working with Ukraine and Starlink to solve this problem, and called SpaceX a wonderful partner in these efforts.
People who are familiar with the situation say that it is difficult to control who uses Starlink in Ukraine. At the same time Ramzan Kadyrov publicly thanked the mask for Starlink. Earlier this year, Ilon Musk gave Putin's airtime and his views on the United States and Ukraine, when X broadcast Taler Carlson with a Russian leader in the Kremlin. In an interview, Putin said that he was convinced that Musk a "smart man".
At the end of last year, the Kremlin first asked the mask to not activate Starlink over Taiwan, said a former Russian intelligence officer informed about the situation. According to him, this request was made as a service of China, to which Russia is increasingly entrusted to trade and bypassing sanctions. The representative of the Chinese Embassy in Washington said they did not know the details and cannot comment.
Starlink has never received permission to grant Internet services in Taiwan, whose government imposes restrictions on non-Yanfa satellite operators. Taiwan is now indicated as "soon" on the Starlink map, where he provides services. A year later, Musk began to worry more about the presidential election.
During the first months of the year, Musk stated that he would refrain from the support of any presidential candidate while conducting private conversations, discussing how he could achieve Trump's election. Musk publicly supported him in July. The businessman said he plans to allocate up to $ 45 million a month to a new political committee that hires agitators to find voters in the States where the fight is going.
Trump's spokeswoman called the mask "the leader of the industry, which happens to generations" and said that "our broken federal bureaucracy can certainly benefit from his ideas and efficiency. " "As for Putin," the spokesman continued, "there is only one candidate in the race, under which he did not invade another country, and he is President Trump.