Is President Donald Trump influenced more by tech billionaire Elon Musk than by his formal cabinet colleagues in determining even the U.S. foreign policy?
The answer, if one goes by the dominant public perception both inside the United States and outside in European capitals, is “Yes”.
His support for the right-of-the-centre parties in Europe, praise for Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni and Argentina’s President Javier Milei, and criticisms of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scoltz, and French President Emmanuel Macron have been widely debated because all these are seemingly in tune with Trump’s world view.
However, Musk’s critics say the billionaire has strongly influenced Trump’s policy towards Ukraine, particularly the proposed ceasefire agreement, which is seen as favouring Russia at the expense of Ukraine.
But this criticism seems unfair. In fact, Musk has been fairly consistent on his views on Ukraine ever since the Russian invasion in February 2022. At that time, he was a supporter of then-President Joe Biden.
Viewed thus, Musk’s recent comments on Ukraine should not surprise anyone. Musk has said: “The President’s (Trump’s) instincts on Ukraine are absolutely right. It is really sad that so many parents have lost their sons, and so many sons their fathers in this pointless war.”
Musk has defended Trump’s remarks that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was a “dictator without elections” and that he “better move fast or he is not going to have a country left.”
While defending the President, Musk also accused Zelenskyy of killing an American journalist, Chilean-American journalist Gonzalo Lira, after reports he was killed last year for being critical of Zelenskyy.
What is more significant, Musk has said that Ukraine’s “front line would collapse if it were not for Starlink internet access”. Musk claims that the Russian army can “jam” all other forms of communication.
Ukraine’s war operations are critically dependent on Musk’s Starlink, as EurAsian Times recently reported. Starlink is essential for Ukraine’s drone operation, a key pillar of its military strategy.
Of course, Musk later clarified in a post to his social media platform X on March 9 that Starlink will never shut off its satellite internet terminals in Ukraine. “To be extremely clear, no matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals. “
It may be noted that Musk had rushed thousands of Starlink terminals (affiliated to mother company SpaceX) to Ukraine to replace communications services destroyed by Russia after its February 2022 invasion.
Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause. But as the war progressed, his company began to balk at the cost. It said that Starlink could not fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time, though later Musk promised to provide free internet services to Ukraine.
However, Musk’s growing uneasiness was also due to the fact that his technology was being used for warfare and thus affecting the brand value of his overall business. This continues to be the case even today.
This explains why Musk started talking of ending the war through a negotiated truce between Vladimir Putin and Zelenskyy six months after the war. He was reported to have received a positive response from Putin, not Zelenskyy. Understandably, he now became more critical of the latter’s handling of the war.
In October 2022, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw Ukraine’s borders and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory that Russia seized in 2014.
Musk argued that Crimea was part of Russia until it was given to Ukraine under the Soviet Union in the 1950s and said that a drawn-out war will likely not end in a resounding Ukrainian victory. He also said Ukraine should adopt a neutral status, dropping the bid to join NATO following Russia’s partial mobilization of reservists.
In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.”
Incidentally, these are the four regions that Russia claimed as its territories following the referendums that were denounced by the Western capitals as a sham. Their argument was that the hastily organized votes in four occupied regions were clearly rigged to serve Putin’s purpose to try to cement his loosening grip on Ukrainian terrain.
It is to be remembered that Musk was saying or arguing all this at a time (October 2022), when the western intelligentsia and policy elites were overwhelmingly in favour of giving Putin a lesson by doing everything possible so that Ukraine won the war decisively. And they were quite confident, thanks to the support of President Biden, that Ukraine would win the war.
At that time, very few scholars like Samuel Charap, a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, who had served on the Policy Planning Staff of the U.S. Department of State during the Obama administration and who had co-authored the book Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia, seemed to agree with Musk that the war in Ukraine was “An Unwinnable War.”
According to Charap, territorial conquest—or reconquest—is not in itself a form of war termination. “The same will likely be true in Ukraine: even if Kyiv were successful beyond all expectations and forced Russian troops to retreat across the international border, Moscow would not necessarily stop fighting”.
Explaining in detail the limitations of both Russia and Ukraine in achieving a total victory in a protracted war, Charap feared that a prolonged war “would keep the risk of possible escalation—either to Russian nuclear use or to a Russian-NATO war—at its current elevated level. Ukraine would be on near-total economic and military life support from the West, which will eventually cause budgetary challenges for Western countries and readiness problems for their militaries. The global economic fallout of the war, including the volatility in grain and energy prices, would persist. The United States would be unable to focus its resources on other priorities, and Russian dependence on China would deepen. Although a long war would also further weaken Russia, that benefit does not outweigh these costs.”
In the absence of any hope for an emphatic victory by either party, Charap recommended the desirability of an armistice agreement between Russia and Ukraine, following the pattern of what had happened in Korea in 1954.
An armistice is essentially a durable cease-fire agreement that does not bridge political divides but keeps peace. Although North and South Korea are still technically at war and both claim the entirety of the peninsula as their sovereign territory, the armistice has largely held.
The same could be tried in Ukraine. To ensure that war does not break out, arrangements such as demilitarized zones, third-party guarantees, and peacekeeping could be explored and negotiated by involving the broader international community. The U.S. or its allies can and should assist here.
In essence, this is what Musk is suggesting, and President Trump is working on that. Seen dispassionately, Musk has been fairly consistent on his view on Ukraine since 2022, contrary to what his critics seem to suggest.
The only difference is that, unlike in the past, Musk today has many more supporters of his idea than in 2022. That none other than President Trump is convinced of this idea is also a big factor in why even Ukraine and Russia are now talking of it.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
- CONTACT: prakash.nanda (at) hotmail.com
