Musk responds to accusation that he thwarted Ukrainian 'sneak attack' on the Russian navy in hopes of preventing a nuclear response



A new biography of Elon Musk claims that the South African billionaire "secretly ordered" his engineers to turn off Starlink services near the Crimean coast last year, thereby thwarting a Ukrainian "sneak attack" on the Russian naval fleet, according to CNN.

Musk responded to the allegation on X Thursday, stating that "SpaceX did not deactivate anything," as he had not agreed to requests to activate the orbital internet service "all the way to Sevastapol" for fear of becoming complicit in a "major act of war."

Notwithstanding Musk's explanation, critics and elements of the Ukrainian government have lashed out at the billionaire, claiming he is responsible for the deaths of Ukrainian civilians resultant of strikes launched by the Russian vessels left undamaged in the Black Sea.

What's the background?

Ukraine, still working to oust occupying Russian forces, has been aided for over a year by Elon Musk's company Starlink, which itself was launched in 2018.

Starlink is a constellation comprising thousands of satellites in low orbit, roughly 341 miles overhead, providing earthlings with corresponding ground antennas with broadband internet.

Owing to the destruction inflicted upon Ukrainian communications systems and power infrastructure by Russian invaders, the country faced an uphill battle in the way of coordinating its defense, reported CBS News.

Mykhailo Fedorov, the country's minister of digital transformation, implored Musk on Feb. 26, 2022, to "provide Ukraine with Starlink stations."

Two days later, Fedorov was thanking Musk for the first of numerous shipments of Starlink terminals.

With stable internet restored, Wired reported Ukrainians were once again able to call their relatives and that the military was in a position to better organize various counteroffensives.

Rose Croshier, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, stressed the system's strategic importance, telling Wired, "In Ukraine you could see immediately that Starlink and other constellations mean you have the opportunity to have a resilient system protected from traditional ground attacks or control."

Dmytro Zinchuk, the head of network operations for the internet provider Freenet, said, "When there is no connection at all, Starlink is just a salvation for people who have been without connection for many weeks," reported NBC News.

Recognizing their utility and the corresponding need, the U.S. got in on the action, with USAID subsidizing some of the thousands of terminals SpaceX moved into Ukraine via Poland.

Like Fedorov — who estimated Starlink's contributions were worth over $100 million as of early 2023 — President Volodymyr Zelensky ultimately thanked Musk for the support.

Musk's support was not, however, unconditional.

The biographer's contention

Walter Isaacson, a former CEO of both CNN and the Aspen Institute, has penned multiple biographies, including tomes about Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. His latest is about Elon Musk.

CNN reported that in his new book, Isaacson claimed that Musk covertly ordered his engineers to turn off his company's Starlink near the Crimean coast to thwart a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.

Fedorov allegedly pleaded with Musk via text during the operation, asking him to restore connectivity for the submarine drones and telling Musk about their capabilities, according to Isaacson.

In one instance last October, the BBC reported Ukraine had carried out a "massive" drone attack on the Black Sea Fleet using nine submarine drones.

Footage taken from one of the submarine drones shows what appears to be a Russian helicopter attempting to shoot it out of the water.

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Isaacson wrote that Musk responded to Fedorov, noting he was impressed by the submarine but would not restore internet connection because it was too provocative, adding that Ukraine was "going too far and inviting strategic defeat," reported the Daily Mail.

As a result, the submarine drones strapped with explosives en route to the fleet allegedly "lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly."

The rationale behind the alleged decision was that Russia would respond to the bombing with nuclear weapons.

Musk has expressed this fear before, stating on Oct. 17, 2022, "If Russia is faced with the choice of losing Crime or using battlefield nukes, they will choose the latter. We've already sanctioned/cutoff Russia in every possible way, so what more do they have left to lose? If we nuke Russia back, they will nuke us and then we have WW3."

Musk added, "Crimea is absolutely seen as a core part of Russia by Russia. Crimea is also of critical national security importance to Russia, as it is their southern navy base. From their standpoint losing Crimea is like USA losing Hawaii & Pearl Harbor."

CNN stressed that the alleged unilateral move of immense geostrategic consequence by the world's richest man made him "a power broker U.S. officials couldn't ignore."

In the biography, Musk reportedly told Isaacson, "How am I in this war? ... Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes."

Inaction viewed as action against Ukraine

While some lauded what they perceived to be a passive effort aimed at avoiding a nuclear holocaust, various critics lashed out at Musk Thursday, with some noting that aiding the Ukrainians in repelling invaders would not constitute an escalation but rather self-defense. Others posting pictures of the remains of civilians killed by Crimean naval strikes.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, stated, "Sometimes a mistake is much more than just a mistake. By not allowing Ukrainian drones to destroy part of the Russian military (!) fleet via #Starlink interference, @elonmusk allowed this fleet to fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities."

Podolyak further suggested that as a result, "civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego."

The billionaire responds

Musk, the largest shareholder of Starlink, responded to the report of Isaacson's claims, stressing, "The Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything."

He added, "There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastapol. 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."

Facing mounting outrage, Musk tweeted Thursday evening, "Both sides should agree to a truce. Every day that passes, more Ukrainian and Russian youth die to gain and lose small pieces of land, with borders barely changing. This is not worth their lives."

This tweet in turn prompted some to suggest that a sunken Russian fleet might have served to expedite a truce.

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Scientists create synthetic human embryos, eliminating need for sperm and eggs, thereby raising major ethical concerns



Scientists at the University of Cambridge and the California Institute of Technology appear to have successfully accomplished what abortionists and libertines have only managed in a piecemeal fashion over recent decades: They have severed reproduction from fertilization.

Researchers have produced synthetic human embryos using stem cells, bypassing the need for sperm or eggs altogether, reported the Guardian.

According to Quanta Magazine, Cambridge professor Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz and Jacob Hanna at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have worked in recent years to craft mouse embryo models from stem cells, then grow them in nutrient-filled bottles, which served as "a kind of crude artificial uterus."
Their monster creations soon developed the basis of what would "become a spinal column, along with the bulbous blob of the nascent head and even a primitive beating heart."

While they were meddling with mice, a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by Chinese reproductive engineer Zhen Lu at the State Key Laboratory of Neuroscience in Shanghai, reportedly generated synthetic embryos using monkey embryonic stem cells, then successfully initiated pregnancies in monkeys via a process resembling in vitro fertilization.

Rather than abandon rodents to retread Lu's monkey business, Żernicka-Goetz and Hanna endeavored to tinker with the world's top primate.

Żernicka-Goetz detailed her latest work in a plenary address Wednesday before the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Boston, noting, "We can create human embryo-like models by the reprogramming of [embryonic stem] cells."

Żernicka-Goetz described cultivating human embryos beyond the equivalent of 14 days of development for a natural embryo, when the synthetic embryo "reached the beginning of a developmental milestone known as gastrulation, when the embryo transforms from being a continuous sheet of cells to forming distinct cell lines and setting up the basic axes of the body. At this stage, the embryo does not yet have a beating heart, gut or beginnings of a brain, but the model showed the presence of primordial cells that are the precursor cells of egg and sperm," noted the Guardian.

Żernicka-Goetz called the dehumanized process and its monstrous result "beautiful," adding, "Our human model is the first three-lineage human embryo model that specifies amnion and germ cells, precursor cells of egg and sperm."

Janet Rossant, a developmental biologist and International Society for Stem Cell Research steering committee member, told the MIT Technology Review that such synthetic embryos, if equipped with all the right cell types, could possibly survive to become viable humans.

Żernicka-Goetz stressed to CNN that "they are not human embryos. ... They are embryo models, but they are very exciting because they are very looking similar to human embryos and very important path towards discovery of why so many pregnancies fail, as the majority of the pregnancies fail around the time of the development at which we build these embryo-like structures."

Żernicka-Goetz's previous synthetic mouse embryos were virtually indistinguishable from the real thing after eight days, according to Quanta magazine.

The difference between an embryo model and the real thing, according to Christine Mummery, developmental biologist in the anatomy and embryology department at Leiden University Medical Center, is that they have "not been derived by fertilization."

While it is illegal to implant these embryos in a woman's womb, the novelty of the stem cell-derived embryos presently affords scientists leeway they would not otherwise have if dealing with embryos resultant of sperm-and-egg fertilization.

"Unlike human embryos arising from in vitro fertilization (IVF), where there is an established legal framework, there are currently no clear regulations governing stem cell derived models of human embryos. There is an urgent need for regulations to provide a framework for the creation and use of stem cell derived models of human embryos," said James Briscoe, associate research director at the Francis Crick Institute.

Robin Lovell-Badge, the head of stem cell biology and developmental genetics at the Francis Crick Institute, told the Guardian, "If the whole intention is that these models are very much like normal embryos, then in a way they should be treated the same. ... Currently in legislation they’re not. People are worried about this."

IVF-sourced embryos are presently subject to the ethics-informed "14-day rule."

Professor Martin Pera with the Jackson Laboratory noted in the journal Development that the 14-day rule, whereby the in vitro culture of the human embryo is not allowed to proceed beyond day 14 of embryonic development in various jurisdictions, was the result of bioethical discussions that took place in the early days of the IVF field in the 1970s, especially after the first successful birth of a British child conceived by IVF.

While the prevailing wisdom appeared to be that it was ethically questionable to conduct experiments on human beings during their embryonic stage of development, according to Pera, the four key arguments advanced in support of a 14-day limit on embryo culture were as follows:

  • "14 days is the last stage in development at which twinning can occur and therefore represents the point of individuation";
  • "not even the founding cells of the nervous system have been specified prior to this stage";
  • "there is substantial embryo loss from the time of fertilisation up to this point"; and
  • "until the process of implantation is complete, the embryo has no potential for further development."

While regulatory bodies at American universities and other research institutions in the U.S. allegedly adhere to the "14-day rule," the International Society for Stem Cell Research issued a recommendation in its 2021 guidance that the possibility of increasing the permitted culture time be considered by "national academies of science, academic societies, funders, and regulators."

NPR reported that the creation of so-called embryiods, living entities made from human stem cells that are increasingly complex and comparable to human embryos, has "added pressure to extend the rule so scientists could compare these new entities with naturally conceived embryos."

Dr. Ildem Akerman, from the University of Birmingham, told the BBC, "These findings suggest that we would soon develop the technology to grow these cells beyond the 14-day limit, with potentially more insights to gain into human development. ... Nevertheless, the ability to do something does not justify doing it."

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Scientists Are Mixing Human Body Parts With Robots And Monkeys. We Don’t Want To See What’s Next

Recent scientific experiments reveal a dangerous desire — and the increasing ability — to alter the fundamental elements of life.