You can dance around the semantics, but there is a reason why the West has been very reluctant to offer up certain kinds of offensive weapons.
And not clear what people would prefer of the following two choices: a) NO Starlink terminals or b) Starlink terminals with terms of use attached?
I think the former would be far worse for Ukraine.
I guess he should have been more specific in his original tweet.
This has been my biggest worry with Musk’s descent into… whatever he’s descended into.
I don’t particularly care what happens to Twitter, not being a user myself, but I’m very aware that Ukraine is making good use of Starlink, and I don’t want to see that fall apart.
Every US based company and all of their assets are considered fair game, now, as targets from Russian hackers, who may or may not have support from the Russian government. If it’s ever in their interest to destroy Starlink, they’ll do so, whether or not they have justification. No American or Western company is going to be considered a neutral party.
The U.S. has been reluctant to offer up weapons that might be used to carry out an invasion of Russia’s sovereign territory. If the United States provided a bunch of American fighter jets that ended up dropping American bombs on Russian cities then it would be a very ugly escalation that would be difficult to walk back from.
If SpaceX provided access to satellite data that ended up getting used to facilitate an invasion of Russia then they could just cut off access to the satellites at any time. So not really the same thing.
That said, concerns about Ukraine hitting targets inside Russia have to be weighed against the fact that Russia has declared a large swathe of Ukraine, including territory that Ukraine has liberated or never lost, to be sovereign Russian territory. Ukrainian soldiers are therefore fighting right now on land that Russia considers to be Russian.
Putin might or might not distinguish privately between real Russia and not really Russia, but he has made sure that Russian law doesn’t allow the government to make that distinction.
Yes, but the United States and other allies have drawn a line at facilitating a war on land that the international community recognizes as Russian. I think that’s a pretty reasonable distinction.
It’s less of a descent than a reveal…
If Russia thought “annexing” territory would stop the international community from contributing to its defense, I’m pretty sure they would have done it to Kyiv already. I mean, they’ve already said it should be theirs, I suspect they just wanted to try another less outlandish seizure first.
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