{"id":9123,"date":"2024-10-26T11:37:52","date_gmt":"2024-10-26T11:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/26\/kremlin-denies-report-elon-musk-and-vladimir-putin-have-been-in-regular-contact-for-last-two-years\/"},"modified":"2024-10-26T11:37:52","modified_gmt":"2024-10-26T11:37:52","slug":"kremlin-denies-report-elon-musk-and-vladimir-putin-have-been-in-regular-contact-for-last-two-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/2024\/10\/26\/kremlin-denies-report-elon-musk-and-vladimir-putin-have-been-in-regular-contact-for-last-two-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Kremlin denies report Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin have been in regular contact for last two years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Kremlin has denied a Wall Street Journal report that Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin have been in regular contact over the last two years.<\/p>\n<p>The world&#8217;s richest man has repeatedly been in touch with the Russian president, <strong>according to the US outlet<\/strong>, citing several current and former US, European and Russian officials.<\/p>\n<div class=\"sdc-site-outbrain sdc-site-outbrain--AR_6\" aria-hidden=\"true\" data-component-name=\"sdc-site-outbrain\" data-target=\"\" data-widget-mapping=\"\" data-installation-keys=\"\">    <\/div>\n<p>They added that the discussions touch on personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.<\/p>\n<p>It comes as <strong>Russia&#8217;s<\/strong><strong> <\/strong>invasion of <strong>Ukraine<\/strong><strong> <\/strong>continues and the <strong>US election<\/strong> approaches next month.<\/p>\n<p>However, the Kremlin and Mr Musk both denied the report.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad ad--teads\">        <\/div>\n<p>On Friday, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: &#8220;No, this is not true.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He said that the pair had had one contact and that was before 2022.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mr Musk<\/strong> himself previously said on his own social media site that they had spoken around April 2021.<\/p>\n<p>However, the new report says that more conversations followed this.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Musk denied the report in a tweet, claiming The Wall Story Journal was biased.<\/p>\n<p>The WSJ report claimed that, amid the conversations, <strong>Mr Putin<\/strong> asked Mr Musk not to activate his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favour to Chinese leader <strong>Xi Jinping<\/strong> &#8211; citing two people briefed on the request.<\/p>\n<p>It added that knowledge of Mr Musk&#8217;s alleged connections with Mr Putin was a guarded secret with several officials in the White House reportedly not aware of it.<\/p>\n<p>The report also claimed that Mr Musk spoke to high-ranking Russian officials too. It named one as Sergei Kiriyenko, Mr Putin&#8217;s first deputy chief of staff &#8211; citing two officials.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&#8216;Hold strong Ukraine&#8217;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>After Russia&#8217;s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Mr Musk came out in support of Kyiv &#8211; tweeting &#8220;hold strong Ukraine&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He also donated Starlink terminals providing free internet access to much of the country under attack from Russia.<\/p>\n<p>But last year, Mr Musk said he <strong>refused a Ukrainian request to activate his satellite network<\/strong> during an attempted attack on Russian ships.<\/p>\n<p>Russia&#8217;s now-former space chief Dmitry Rogozin has threatened Mr Musk over his support for Ukraine and has repeatedly shared messages about him, and Starlink, on his Telegram channel.<\/p>\n<p>Mr Musk operates SpaceX, which runs the Starlink service, and is the primary rocket launcher for the Pentagon and NASA.<\/p>\n<p>He has campaigned for Donald Trump, and given sizeable donations to his election efforts.<\/p>\n<p>Sky&#8217;s US partner network NBC News has approached Mr Musk for comment.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div>This post appeared first on sky.com<\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Kremlin has denied a Wall Street Journal report that Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin have been in regular contact over the last two years. The world&#8217;s richest man has repeatedly been in touch with the Russian president, according to the US outlet, citing several current and former US, European and Russian officials. They added <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9124,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9123","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}