Kremlin autocrat Vladimir Putin praised Elon Musk on Wednesday, telling university students he was a pioneer comparable to legendary Soviet rocket engineer Sergei Korolev.
The comments came as Russia and the United States forged closer ties under President Donald Trump’s administration, of which billionaire SpaceX founder Musk is a key figure.
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“You know, there’s a man, he lives in the States, Musk, who, you could say, raves about Mars,” Putin told students on a visit to Bauman University, a Moscow college that specializes in science and engineering.
“These are the kind of people who don’t often appear in the human population, charged-up with a certain idea.”
“If it seems incredible even today, such ideas often come to fruition after a while. Just like the ideas of Korolev, our pioneers, came about in due time,” Putin added.
Korolev, widely regarded as the father of the Soviet space program, oversaw the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik, and the 1961 mission that sent Yuri Gagarin into orbit. Born in Zhytomyr - now in independent Ukraine - he began his education and early engineering work in Kyiv.
Though he later worked under the Soviet government in Moscow, Korolev is seen in Ukraine as a national figure and a symbol of the country’s often-overlooked role in Soviet-era space achievements.
Musk, the world’s richest man and Trump’s most powerful advisor, is the head of SpaceX, a US company that launches rockets for NASA and owns the Starlink satellite internet network.
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Musk has been a frequent critic of Ukraine, which is currently battling a three-year Russian offensive.
The billionaire accused Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last month of wanting a “forever war”, and in February said Kyiv had gone “too far” in the conflict.
[The owner of social media platform X, Musk has long railed against a US agency that battles Russian propaganda and other foreign disinformation, which the US administration closed on Wednesday. Trump’s team framed the move as a way to protect conservatives’ “free speech,” which, along with frequent posts by Russian operatives, is rampant on X.]
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