Commentary: Elon Musk has the power to block Ukraine attacks on Russian ships. Does he know how to use it?

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.

A year later, Ukraine has crossed numerous so-called red lines, including around Crimea, and it’s clear that if Putin really is willing to order a nuclear strike against a non-nuclear country he is attacking, the threshold is considerably higher.

In fairness to Musk, though, the US government has made a similar call by not giving long-range ATACM surface-to-surface missiles to Ukraine, which has said clearly it wants to use against targets in Crimea. As Ukraine pushes south with its counteroffensive, the peninsula’s fate increasingly looks like a potential point of tension between Kyiv and its allies, and not just Musk.

“COCKTAIL OF IGNORANCE AND BIG EGO”

From Ukraine’s point of view, retrieving Crimea is essential, because since annexing it in 2014, Putin as turned it into a vast military base pointed at Ukraine’s underbelly. So long as that remains, and there’s a fleet docked in Sevastopol, Russia will have the power to block critical ports and launch further invasions at will, making Ukraine all but uninvestible.

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”.

Podolyak pulled no punches in his post on X, describing Musk’s decision as the result of “a cocktail of ignorance and big ego’’ that cost the lives of civilians later killed by Russia’s ship-launched missiles.