On October 3, the famous American businessman Elon Musk offered Ukrainians his “peace plan” based on false and pro-Russian claims. His outrageous statements can be explained by his desire to get Ukrainian lithium, writes Apostrof.
Economist Oleksiy Kushch reminded about the coup in Bolivia in 2019: the left-wing president Evo Morales was forced out by the opposition and the military. Power was taken over by the military, led by General Williams Kaliman Romero, who served as Bolivia’s military attaché in Washington in 2013-2016. However, the main reason for the coup was Bolivia’s lithium resources. The world's largest salt flat Uyuni with an area of 10,500 square-kilometers is home to 50 to 70 percent of the world’s explored lithium reserves, which is more than 100 million tons.
Why does Musk need lithium?
“Lithium is a key resource in the green transition, on which the global economy's leap from gasoline engines to electric cars that use lithium-ion batteries depends. The world's largest consumer of lithium is the Tesla corporation with its ambitious plans: to produce 500,000 electric cars per year, but to do so they have to control the entire world lithium, the price of which has increased from $2,000 to $20,000 since 1998,” the expert says.
In July 2019, Rosatom became a participant in the Uyuni lithium carbonate plant construction project under the auspices of the Lithium Deposit Company of Bolivia (YLB) and the Chinese consortium TBEA Group-Baocheng. The total investment exceeded $2 billion. In particular, they planned to build a battery factory.
Recently, there was a dispute on Twitter: some Latin American leaders blamed certain outside forces for the coup in Bolivia. The discussion was unexpectedly joined by Elon Musk, who said that “we will overthrow whoever we want if we need to.”
This may also apply to Ukraine: the matter is that there are industrial reserves of lithium (Shevchenkivske deposit) in the Velykonovosilkivskiy district of the Donetsk region, with a volume of 14 million tons and an initial investment of only $120 million. There are also lithium reserves in the south of Ukraine. They are located exactly in the regions where Musk wanted to hold “referendums”.
The Russian trace in Musk's life also comes to mind. Many people remember Musk's very famous project called Hyperloop. A number of the U.S. critics consider the whole project a scam designed to slow down the construction of high-speed railroad in California, which competes with the unprofitable Tesla.
The project proposed by Elon Musk is being implemented by two companies: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies and billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop One, which joined the project in the fall of 2017. That same fall, Russian oligarch Ziyavudin Magomedov joined the company's board of directors, whose Caspian Venture Capital, registered in the offshore state of Delaware, invested about $100 million in the project in several tranches.
Participation in the board of directors of Virgin Hyperloop One allowed the mentioned Russian billionaire to coordinate and control Hyperloop's policy on the implementation of the project in other countries. Cooperation with a friend of the former deputy head of the Russian government Arkady Dvorkovich and the infamous ex-president of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev added a typical Russian criminal component to Musk’s project - fraud, lawsuits, and threats of murder. It seems that cooperation with the Russians did not bother Mask. So why should it bother him now.
Tags: Elon Musk lithium
Musk does NOT need Ukrainian lithium,he has plenty in his own backyard