Why Donald Trump And Elon Musk’s Bromance Might Spell Trouble For Ukraine

In the 24 hours after Election Day, President-elect Donald Trump spoke with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. While their communication followed the usual protocol of world leaders reaching out to congratulate the incoming U.S. president, the call raised eyebrows because of a third participant: billionaire Elon Musk.

Musk’s sudden ascension from a billionaire private citizen with outsize influence in Ukraine to a top Trump campaign surrogate and member of the president-elect’s inner circle makes him a wild card regarding the U.S. position on the Ukraine war.

His participation in Trump’s call with Zelenskyy indicates there’s “still serious interest for him in what happens in Ukraine,” Doug Klain, a policy analyst for Razom for Ukraine, a nonprofit humanitarian aid and advocacy organization, told HuffPost.

Musk’s aerospace company SpaceX operates the internet terminals and constellation of Starlink satellites that Ukraine’s civilian population and its military have come to rely on for communication during the war.

During the call, the billionaire told Zelenskyy he would continue to provide Starlink service to his country, according to Axios, which first reported on it.

But Musk’s reported statement is unlikely to reassure Kyiv.

Since the Nov. 6 call, Musk has appeared to mock Zelenskyy’s comments that Ukraine is an independent country that cannot be forced to accept any kind of deal with Russia.

Zelenskyy’s “sense of humor is amazing,” Musk wrote on X (formerly Twitter), the social media platform that he owns, in a Nov. 16 post that also cited a BBC News article including details about Zelenskyy’s past career as a comedian.

While Musk had originally been enthusiastic about providing Starlink service to the war-torn country in the early stages of the conflict, there were signs the tech CEO was starting to grow uneasy with the use of the technology in the battlefield.

In October 2022, Ukrainian forces reported service outages amid their counteroffensives in areas controlled by Russia in the south of the country. Ukrainian officials told the Financial Times the interruption may have been “the result of SpaceX-imposed geographical restrictions.” Around the same time, Musk also started balking at the cost, at one point threatening the U.S. government that he would cut off service to Ukraine unless the U.S. helped fund it. Eventually, the Pentagon signed a contract with SpaceX to continue the operation.

In an August 2023 New Yorker article, investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposed how the U.S. government has come to rely on Musk, an unelected private citizen, on a host of issues, including the Ukraine war.

“There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space,” Farrow wrote in The New Yorker. The article was published before the billionaire struck an alliance with Trump.

Musk had originally said he was not going to endorse a candidate in the 2024 election, before having a change of heart and fully embracing Trump, becoming one of his top surrogates and donors in the final months of the race.

The two men have been inseparable since the election, with Trump even joining Musk for a SpaceX launch in South Texas, raising questions about the extent of Musk’s influence on the incoming Trump administration in major areas, including foreign policy. The two men also celebrated Thanksgiving together at Mar-a-Lago.

“As long as he’s in favor with Trump, Elon Musk will attempt to to shape the outcome of Trump administration policy towards Ukraine and and what happens next,” Klain said. “He’s clearly interested in this and will keep trying to influence it.”

Musk, who positioned himself as an outright supporter of Ukraine when Russia first invaded its neighbor, turned into a skeptic of Kyiv’s war effort around the time he reportedly started having more communications with the Kremlin, including with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“This is an individual who has significant contact with Russia and its leadership at a time when Russia is behaving in a way that contravenes all kinds of international norms, and he has made it clear that he intends to push this issue in a very specific direction that aligns with Putin’s inclinations on it,” Farrow told HuffPost.

Meanwhile, Trump reportedly spoke to Putin “maybe as many as seven times” since he left office in January 2021, according to journalist Bob Woodward’s book “War,” which was published in October. Trump also held a call with the Russian leader following his election win, during which he called on Putin to refrain from escalating the war, according to The Washington Post. (The Kremlin contested reports of the call.)

For reference, President Joe Biden’s last phone call with Putin was in February 2022, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Trump’s reelection has prompted concern about the role of the U.S. going forward in the conflict. During the campaign, Trump declined to answer whether it would be in the United States’ interest for Ukraine to win the war.

“I think it’s in the U.S. best interest to get this war finished and just get it done,” he said during an ABC News presidential debate in September.

To that end, Trump has said one of his orders of business as president will be to broker a deal between the two sides.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.), a co-chair of the Congressional Ukraine Caucus, told HuffPost last month that the worst-case scenario for Ukraine would be if it were forced to accept “a bad deal, which just gives Putin a chance to rest and gives him a territory that he’s earned through warfare.”

“Unfortunately this would be a victory, if it plays out like this, for Putin and autocrats across the world,” Quigley added.

While the president-elect has not laid out the details of what any potential agreement would look like, his close ally Musk has previously volunteered his own vision.

Under Musk’s four-point peace plan ― which he asked his followers on X to vote on in October 2022 ― Ukraine would have to cede Crimea to Russia and agree to retain water supply for the territory, among other things.

Musk’s proposals “sounded exactly like what Vladimir Putin has been saying, and exactly like what Vladimir Putin has been calling for,” Klain told HuffPost.

According to Farrow’s reporting, Musk has held discussions with Putin, including about the war. (Musk has denied discussing the war with the Russian president.) Their reported communication has led to questions, including about whether the Russian leader could seek to leverage his relationship with Musk to try and steer the U.S. in the direction he wants on the war, given the billionaire’s proximity to Trump.

“Putin is going to be working very hard to personally appeal to Trump and potentially to others in the Trump administration, to shape their actions, to shape Trump administration policy, and to do so at the cost of Ukraine,” Klain said.

Precious Chatterje-Doody, a senior lecturer in politics and international studies at Open University, said the Kremlin “takes a flexible and pragmatic approach to foreign influence,” and that Putin is willing to help advance the agendas of foreign actors “if they play into its own broader interests.”

“Putin would be more than happy to play up Russia’s ‘traditional values’ agenda as being compatible with Musk’s ‘anti-woke’ crusade in the U.S. to give the impression that there’s some sort of shared-values basis for cooperation in the face of a hostile world,” Chatterje-Doody told HuffPost.

Despite his contact with Putin, a U.S. adversary, Musk remains crucial to America’s efforts to support Ukraine, even though he has more conflicting business interests on the issue.

While SpaceX has a contract with the U.S. government for Starlink, Musk continues to rely on China, an ally of Russia, for Tesla manufacturing. Musk previously told the Financial Times that Beijing was not pleased with his decision to make Starlink available to Ukraine.

Farrow told HuffPost that the rise of private influence on government and the flow of special-interest money into politics “all culminates in a figure like Elon Musk having such a thumb on the scales of power in so many respects, and that is only going to get more apparent with him taking on this supposed role in the Department of Government Efficiency.”

Musk has been tapped to lead DOGE with former GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy with the aim of slashing federal budgets. The two men have set their sights on the Pentagon’s budget, which could potentially spell trouble for Kyiv.

“Given Elon Musk’s very particular set of foreign policy loyalties, I think that we shouldn’t be surprised if we see some of those cuts queuing against Ukraine, for example,” Farrow told HuffPost.

Musk stands to reap big benefits from his new role, both as it relates to his businesses and in relation to the investigations he faces from government oversight bodies. This reality, coupled with the fact that the Trump administration is unlikely to place any guardrails around Musk, should pose concern, Farrow said.

“It’s a perfect storm of rising private influence as a consequence of unfettered late stage capitalism gone awry, and an administration with authoritarian tendencies and a high tolerance for breaches of conventional ethics rules and a vision of the executive branch that essentially doesn’t include oversight or restraint,” Farrow told HuffPost.

Musk’s elevated role comes at a critical juncture in the war for Ukraine.

Zelenskyy said that Russia’s move to fire an intermediate-range ballistic missile last month is part of Putin’s strategy to inflict significant damage to Ukraine and push it out of the Russian territory it has gained ahead of Trump’s inauguration.

“I am sure he wants to push us out by Jan. 20,” Zelenskyy said of Putin, according to The New York Times. “It is very important for him to demonstrate that he is in control of the situation.”

More recently, Russia has launched attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure in several cities, including Kyiv, a move that many parties fear is meant to hurt the country’s power-generating capacity ahead of the winter.

Klain said that if Musk continues to be a skeptic on Ukraine, the best outcome Kyiv could hope for is that Trump and Musk have a falling-out.

“It’s very easy, as we know, for people to fall out of favor with Trump and to be sidelined,” Klain said. “And that may well happen to Musk if he thinks that he is more important to Trump than Trump thinks he is.”

Jonathan Nicholson contributed reporting.