Russian President Vladimir Putin has held several conversations with Elon Musk over the past two years, during which he also asked the tech billionaire for a favor on behalf of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, according to a new Wall Street Journal report published Thursday .
Several current and former U.S., European and Russian officials cited by the Journal said the regular contact between the Russian leader and the tech billionaire began in late 2022 and covered “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”
As part of their talks, Putin also asked Musk not to activate the Starlink service over Taiwan to appease Xi, a former Russian intelligence officer with knowledge of the request told the Journal. Russia has become closer and increasingly dependent on China for the trade and navigation sanctions imposed on the country over its invasion of Ukraine. An official at the Chinese embassy in Washington told the newspaper they had no comment on the subject.
Musk has not yet commented on the contents of the Journal’s report.
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed the alleged close contact between Putin and Musk, saying there was only one phone conversation between the two men in which they discussed space, among other things, the Journal reported.
Musk’s reported conversations with Putin, a major US adversary, raise potential national security concerns for the US government as his company SpaceX is involved in several US intelligence and military projects.
Musk has also played a major role in former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, donating millions to his own Trump super PAC as well as headlining events promoting his bid for the White House.
Meanwhile, a new book written by journalist Bob Woodward, titled ‘War’, claims that Trump and Putin have spoken several times since he left office in January 2021.
Trump declined to confirm Woodward’s reporting, telling Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait: “If I did that, it’s smart.”
Putin also dismissed the reporting in the book on Thursday as ‘nonsense’.
“But when Trump says he wants to end the war in Ukraine, I think he is sincere,” he said at the BRICS conference.
Trump has claimed that resolving the nearly three-year conflict would be one of his first orders as newly elected president, but has provided no details on how that would be achieved.
His stance on the war has also alarmed Democratic lawmakers and U.S. allies, who worry about the future of U.S. aid to Kiev if Trump is re-elected next month.
Read the full report in The Wall Street Journal.
