On February 12, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk contended that there is “no way in hell” that Russia will be defeated in its conflict with Ukraine.
Musk made the remark during a discussion about a Senate bill meant to provide additional U.S. aid to Kyiv on X Spaces — part of his social media platform X.
He was accompanied by a number of other people resisting further funding for Ukraine, including Republican Senators Ron Johnson, J.D. Vance, and Mike Lee; former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and entrepreneur David Sacks.
”This spending doesn’t help Ukraine. Prolonging the war doesn’t help Ukraine,” the Tesla and SpaceX chief said, as quoted by Bloomberg.
He called on Americans to contact their elected representatives about the $95 billion emergency spending proposal, which includes $60 billion for Ukraine, as well as funding for Israel and Taiwan.
The bill passed the Senate on February 13, but it is slated to meet fierce resistance in the House of Representatives, where opposition to further funding for Kyiv is much stronger among Republicans demanding more spending on security at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Musk has been urging for a peaceful settlement of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and has slammed U.S. military assistance to Kyiv on various occasions during the two years of the fighting. Moreover, Musk said that calling him an apologist for Russian President Vladimir Putin over those statements was “absurd.”
Musk’s companies “have probably done more to undermine Russia than anything,” the entrepreneur insisted, stating that SpaceX had provided its Starlink internet service to Ukraine.
Musk said what he really desires is for deaths to cease on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides.
He also addressed some Western politicians who “want regime change in Russia,” saying, “they should think about who is the person that could take out Putin, and is that person likely to be a peacenik? Probably not.” That person would likely be “even more hardcore than Putin,” he added.
Last week, Putin spoke about Musk in his interview with independent U.S. journalist Tucker Carlson, calling Musk “a smart person.”
“I think there’s no stopping Elon Musk, he will do as he sees fit,” Putin said, adding that his activities still need to be “formalized and subjected to certain rules.”
Meanwhile, Carlson said on February 12 that U.S. senators who plan to send an additional $60 billion in aid to Ukraine will be voting for the continued slaughter of Ukrainians, since the country cannot defeat Russia, even with Western aid.
Carlson, a long-time critic of Washington’s Ukraine policy, which he believes to be short-sighted and self-destructive, lambasted the proposed legislation, maintaining that anyone paying attention has been aware of Kyiv’s faltering position for months.
“Ukraine doesn’t have the industrial capacity — neither does NATO or the United States. And it doesn’t have the people — Russia has 100 million more in population than Ukraine does. And that means that further support from the West for the Ukrainian military only means more dead Ukrainians and a further degraded Western economy,” he claimed.
Lobbying for more funding is “insane,” “cruel,” and morally indefensible, Carlson added.
The bill would approve spending past 2024, obliging the winner of November’s U.S. presidential election to continue financing the Ukrainian military.
Senator J.D. Vance believes the bill is meant to imperil Donald Trump should he win the presidential election. He told Carlson that, if signed into law, the bill could potentially be used to justify yet another Trump impeachment.
Vance agreed with Carlson’s evaluation of the situation in Ukraine and claimed that privately, Democratic senators agree with it, too.
“They say effectively that they want to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian drop of blood,” he said.
“I think if you really ask these guys, they’d recognize that this is not in the best interest of Ukraine. This is fundamentally in the interests of military contractors and people who think that America’s most pressing challenge is to defeat the Russians,” he added, underscoring that he was not one of those people.
Moreover, Vance called such a measure a “time bomb,” stating that the latest Ukraine package calls for funding that would expire “nearly a year into the possible second term of President Trump,” suggesting that Democrats could eventually impeach him if he chose not to renew the aid.
“If President Trump were to withdraw from or pause financial support for the war in Ukraine in order to bring the conflict to a peaceful conclusion … it would amount to the same fake violation of budget law from the first impeachment,” Vance wrote, adding that “Partisan Democrats would seize on the opportunity to impeach him once again.”
He went on to say that the aid bill “represents an attempt by the foreign policy blob/deep state to stop President Trump from pursuing his desired policy,” as the former president has repeatedly challenged American support for Ukraine since the outbreak of the conflict with Russia.
Democrats voted to impeach Trump in late 2019, accusing him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after he threatened to withhold U.S. aid to Ukraine during a call with his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky.
Part of a larger funding package amounting to over $95 billion, the bill would earmark $60 billion for Kyiv, as well as additional aid for Israel and U.S. allies in Asia. For months, the bill has been subject to political deadlock. Trump himself has lambasted the legislation, recently telling an audience in South Carolina that such foreign aid should be repaid to the U.S. government.
“They want to give, like, almost $100 billion to a few countries, $100 billion. I said, ‘Why do we do this? If you do, you give them, not $100 billion, you give it to ‘em as a loan,’” he said.
Following prolonged negotiations over the new military package in Washington, a final vote to pass the Senate’s version of the bill could come as soon as this week, based on various reports.
Trump has said on several occasions that he would somehow resolve the two-year-old conflict “in one day” if he were to return to the White House. His eldest son, Donald Trump, Jr., suggested that “the only way” to persuade Zelensky to engage in talks with Russia was to “cut off the money” that Washington supplies to Kyiv.
