Musk acknowledges he turned off Starlink internet access last year during Ukraine attack on Russia military

Elon Musk on Thursday acknowledged turning off internet access from his Starlink satellites during a Ukrainian raid last year on a Russian naval fleet, saying he did so to prevent SpaceX from being “complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Musk responded on his social media platform X to new details from an upcoming book that indicated he ordered his engineers to shut off communications network before the attack off the Crimean coast.

“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk wrote on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.

“The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” Musk wrote.