In response to Musk’s position, Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski stressed that the Polish ministry of digitization is one of the largest suppliers of Starlink in Ukraine, with Warsaw which finances half of the 42,000 Starlink terminals operating in the country at a cost of around 50 million dollars per year.
“If SpaceX turns out to be an unreliable supplier, we will be forced to search for other suppliers,” wrote Sikorski in his article on X, calling “ethics” of “threatening the victim of the aggression” of Musk.
Musk replied: “Be calm, little man. You pay a tiny cost fraction. And there is no substitute for Starlink.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also responded to the Sikorski post, demanding that more gratitude be shown for Starlink.
“No one threatened to cut Ukraine from Starlink,” said Rubio on X. “And thank you because without Starlink, Ukraine would have lost this war for a long time and the Russians would be on the border with Poland at the moment.”
As Politico reported a week ago, the European Commission already examines how it can help Ukraine guarantee an alternative satellite communication capacity following Musk threats.
Musk supervised his Sunday article as a message to end the war in Ukraine, but according to press information, Starlink threats can be part of Washington’s strategy to put kyiv in an agreement on Ukraine critical minerals.
A possible mineral agreement between Ukraine and the United States could be on the table in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, when the delegations of the two countries come together for the first time since the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy clashed with American president Donald Trump in the White House at the end of February.
