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Topics: World News, Russia, Elon Musk, Celebrity
Jess Hardiman
The Kremlin has praised Elon Musk for his latest Twitter poll, describing his ‘peaceful’ proposal for a route out of the ongoing conflict between Russia and Ukraine as ‘very positive’.
Yesterday, Musk offered up what he felt were four suggestions for ‘Ukraine-Russia Peace’, which included redoing elections of annexed regions, but this time under ‘UN supervision’, and formally recognising the Crimean peninsula as Russian territory.
His ideas were formatted as a poll, with Twitter users given the option of voting 'yes' or 'no' to the ideas.
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“This is highly likely to be the outcome in the end – just a question of how many die before then,” Musk said in a follow-up post, adding: “Also worth noting that a possible, albeit unlikely, outcome from this conflict is nuclear war.”
At the time of writing, with two hours left to go on the poll, there is a total of 59.4 percent of votes for ‘No’, compared to 40.6 percent for ‘Yes’.
Responding to Musk’s posts, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov has praised the Tesla CEO, having told reporters in a conference call: “It is very positive that somebody like Elon Musk is looking for a peaceful way out of this situation.
“Compared to many professional diplomats, Musk is still searching for ways to achieve peace. And achieving peace without fulfilling Russia’s conditions is absolutely impossible.”
But Musk’s poll didn’t go down quite as well with everyone, including Ukrainian diplomat Andriy Melnyk, who told the billionaire: “F**k off is my very diplomatic reply to you @elonmusk.”
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy also called Musk out, tagging him in a Twitter poll and asking the world: “Which @elonmusk do you like more?”
The two options to choose from were ‘One who supports Ukraine’ or ‘One who supports Russia’.
And it wasn’t just heat from Ukraine that he faced, either, with Lithuania’s president Gitanas Nauseda hitting back at the billionaire, tweeting: "Dear @elonmusk, when someone tries to steal the wheels of your Tesla, it doesn't make them legal owner of the car or of the wheels. Even though they claim both voted in favor of it. Just saying.”
US Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger also joined in on the debate, posting on Twitter: “This idea reminds me of fourth grade social studies where we came up with a peace plan between USSR and USA. We thought that if Gorbachev and Reagan were forced to eat one dinner of American food and 1 of Russian, they would become friends. For reals.”
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