Elon Musk gave biographer top Ukrainian official's private messages ...

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Elon Musk gave his biographer private messages from a top Ukraine official without seeking permission, revealing exchanges over the entrepreneur restricting the Starlink internet service to thwart Kyiv’s military.

Ukrainian deputy prime minister Mykhailo Fedorov told the Financial Times on Friday that he was unaware that Walter Isaacson had obtained and published the messages in a forthcoming biography of Musk written with the billionaire’s full collaboration.

“It’s not very pretty,” Fedorov said in an interview in his office in Kyiv. “I’ve never shown or talked about our correspondence publicly.”

Isaacson relates in his book how Musk intervened to cut Ukrainian military access for Starlink close to Ukrainian territory occupied by Russian forces in late September. The intervention scuppered a secret Ukrainian naval drone attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet in Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea.

Musk defended the temporary cut in Starlink access for some Ukrainian forces with a post on his X social media platform on Thursday, hours before the Washington Post published Isaacson’s excerpt.

“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he wrote. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The biography, and a related column by Isaacson in the Washington Post on Friday, includes a text message exchange where Fedorov pleads with Musk to restore the Starlink connections to Ukrainian forces.

Fedorov appeared shocked when shown the Post article by the FT but said that since the exchange was a year old its publication would be unlikely to have operational repercussions.

After reports by the FT and other media in October about Starlink interruptions in Ukraine, Musk agreed to restore the service for Ukrainian forces operating near Russian forces.

Fedorov said Musk “told me himself” that he switched off the Starlink service around the frontline in Ukraine’s south-east “when I asked him to actually turn on communication in Crimea and to the borders [of Ukraine as they have existed since 1991]”.

“When he turned it on, he wrote that he had turned it back on,” Fedorov added.

Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, who has repeatedly thanked and praised Musk publicly for providing the Starlink service, reiterated his gratitude on Friday. “I think that if he hadn’t done it, it would have been a disaster, we just wouldn’t be able to fight like this if he hadn’t done it.”

Fedorov acknowledged lengthy and frequent conversations over text messages with Musk following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

After Musk tweeted a message that Fedorov viewed as being pro-Russian president Vladimir Putin, the minister said he texted the tech tycoon. “I explained to him that he was wrong, that we were, like, fighting for our independence there.”

The temporary Starlink cut occurred at a crucial moment in Ukraine’s counteroffensive last autumn, when the country’s military had momentum on its side following the sweeping recapture of Russian-occupied territory in the Kharkiv region and was endeavouring to retake land in the direction of the Crimean Peninsula.

Other Ukrainian officials were sharper in their criticism of Musk on Friday.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, blamed Musk for sparing Russian vessels that went on to fire missiles at Ukrainian cities.

“As a result, civilians, children are being killed,” he wrote on Musk’s social media platform X. “This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego.”