The animosity between Ukraine and billionaire Elon Musk is undisguised. The tycoon, who campaigns against expanding US aid to the country invaded by Russia, has published a meme on platform X, the former Twitter that he owns, to mock the demands of the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to receive more assistance from Washington for the war. The reply from the Ukrainian parliament and its president arrived a few hours later through the same channel.
Musk owns SpaceX, which provides Starlink satellite communications services that are vital to Ukraine’s defense effort, which initially made Kyiv appreciate its role in the war. However, his opinions on the future of the war have been seen as pro-Russian (at the beginning of the invasion the magnate suggested that Ukraine should consider giving up land in exchange for peace) and their relationship has also become strained, because he refused to activate the satellites to facilitate Ukrainian attacks on the Russian Black Sea Fleet.
On the same day that US President Joe Biden postponed the latest aid package for Ukraine to avoid a partial shutdown of his government, Musk posted a meme on his platform dedicated to Zelensky. “When five minutes have passed and you haven’t asked for a billion dollars in aid,” says the text that accompanies the photomontage of the Ukrainian president’s face embedded in a high school student who, according to the etymology of the meme, is desperately trying to contain a flatulence in class.
The Ukrainian leader and his top lieutenants have appealed to their allies throughout the war to secure billions of dollars in military aid to resist and beat back the Russian invasion. Zelensky visited Washington and New York in September and met with senior officials in a bid to get more help.
The president of the Ukrainian parliament, Ruslan Stefanchuk, later responded to Musk’s mockery: “The case when… (Elon Musk) tried to conquer space, but something went wrong and in 5 minutes he was full of shit up to his eyes,” an apparent reference to the failed SpaceX rocket launch in April.
The Ukrainian parliament counterattacked in the same way on its X profile, with a meme accusing Musk of spreading Russian propaganda, although it later deleted it. As reported by the Reuters agency, the publication consisted of a version of the meme with a photo of Musk and the following message: “When 5 minutes have passed and you have not spread Russian propaganda.”
Although Zelensky did not comment directly on the mockery, a Ukrainian presidential advisor, Mykhailo Podolyak, who has criticized some of Musk’s statements in the past, assured that either remaining silent or being ironic about Ukraine means playing into the hands of propaganda. Russian. “Unfortunately, not everyone and not always, being important media figures, but being thousands of kilometers from the epicenter of the war, is able to realize what the daily bombings and crying children are like. who lose their parents,” he wrote in X.
Over the weekend, aid to Ukraine was omitted from a stopgap funding measure passed by the US Congress to avoid a US government shutdown. The United States has been the largest single donor to Ukraine since Russia’s full invasion last year, giving tens of billions of dollars in military and financial aid.
