Questionable peace plan
Musk gets lost in Kremlin rhetoric
A comment by Marc Dimpfel
07.10.2022, 18:04
Billionaire Elon Musk made a proposal on Twitter to end the Ukraine war. This is not only short-sighted, but also dangerous. Because in his argument he is completely lost. The Russian propaganda machine is happy about that.
When it comes to trumpeting your own unfiltered opinion on the World Wide Web, Twitter is the ideal tool. Elon Musk also uses this with reliable regularity. The richest person in the world recently presented his self-imagined peace plan for Ukraine to his more than 100 million followers. Apparently, this not only exceeds the military competence of the tech billionaire: he is thereby, albeit involuntarily, in common with Russian war propaganda.
In a post Monday, Musk outlined how he believes peace can be brought to Ukraine. Under the supervision of the United Nations, national affiliation should be voted on in the four Russian-occupied areas of Cherson, Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhia. If it is the will of the local people, Russia must withdraw. The annexed peninsula of Crimea remains in Russian hands and Ukraine remains independent.
So far, so unworldly. Musk’s vision of peace seems to have no room for sovereignty under international law. According to his logic, Russia can invade a neighboring country and take entire territories there by force, as long as there is some sort of vote afterwards. That Russia will by no means agree to democratic referendums under UN supervision, because firstly it would then have to admit that the first votes were just for show, and secondly because it would then have to risk that the regions really don’t want to become Russian at all – for free. But the idea that Russia will pull out dutifully if “the will of the people” wants it that way is absurd.
The outraged reactions were not long in coming. The Ukrainian ambassador Andriy Melnyk acknowledged the proposal with a diplomatic “fuck off”. It’s a well-known fact that Musk doesn’t care what people think of him. As a multi-billionaire, he doesn’t have to. But in this case, a little more critical faculty and a little less self-portrayal would have done him good. Because on Thursday, Musk followed up a tweet from US Congressman Lindsey Graham with a map showing the results of the 2012 Ukrainian general election.
The will of the people?
This shows that in many parts of the country the majority voted for the EU-friendly Fatherland party, while in southern and eastern Ukraine the Party of Regions was in the lead. “Blue is the pro-Russian party,” Musk wrote, meaning the latter. In the East, there are “Russian majorities who prefer Russia,” he concludes. This account is so abbreviated that it is wrong. Musk is undermining the political complexity of Ukraine. The “Party of Regions” was actually closer to Russia than to the West. Their aim, however, was never to cede Ukrainian territory to Russia. In addition, it is impossible to read from a ten-year-old map how the mood in the population is today – after the Euromaidan protests, the annexation of Crimea and especially the Russian invasion.
But that’s exactly what Musk does. He implies that people in the occupied territories want to belong to Russia. In doing so, he unabashedly carries on the Russian narrative with which Putin justifies his brutal war of aggression and justifies the annexations. A fodder for Kremlin propaganda: Russian state television picked up the card tweet and staged Musk as an advocate of the war.
Of course, everyone is free to express their opinion, no matter how unfounded it may be. However, Musk’s Ukraine tweets are doubly questionable: he misinforms his followers of millions and also makes himself a plaything for Russian propaganda. Musk claims that his main concern is to stop the suffering in Ukraine and to avert a further escalation of the war. But his outrageous arguments add nothing to it, they even ignore the actual situation of the people in the country. Elon Musk may be many things: entrepreneur genius, do-gooder, visionary. In his role as a peacemaker, however, he suffers from a dangerous overconfidence.