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WTF?! The Cybertruck may look like a poorly rendered video game car, but it's fast and it's tough. Perhaps that's why a Chechen warlord decided to deck the vehicle out with a machine gun and take it into battle. After sharing footage of himself driving the EV around in August, Ramzan Kadyrov now claims that Musk remotely disabled the Cybertruck after it was deployed to the front lines in Ukraine.
According to a report by CNN, the Putin-backed leader claimed the high-tech vehicle had been "performing well" in combat until Musk hit the kill switch, forcing it to be towed away.
"What Elon Musk did was not nice," Kadyrov grumbled. "He gives expensive gifts from the heart and then remotely switches them off." He added that Musk's alleged move was "not manly."
Not surprisingly, Musk denied having anything to do with gifting the warlord a Cybertruck in the first place.
– Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) August 17, 2024Kadyrov said he received a Tesla Cybertrack from Elon Musk. He promised to send it to the "special military operation" zone and attached a machine gun to it.
"Elon, thank you! Come to Grozny, I will receive you as the most dear guest! I do not think that our Russian MFA will be… pic.twitter.com/m72fg2G2PU
"Are you seriously so retarded that you think I donated a Cybertruck to a Russian general?" the billionaire had snapped last month at a post on X/Twitter, in which Kadyrov claimed to have received one as a present.
Undeterred, Kadyrov this week posted fresh footage on Telegram showing not one but two Cybertrucks with guns mounted on the roof and operating "without any failures" in a woodland combat zone in Ukraine. He also praised the truck's "maneuverability" and how well it protected the crew. The video showed gunmen in military uniforms firing the weapons as the vehicles were driven in a forested area.
Kadyrov somehow breaking his previous record for "dumbest video ever" with his armed Cybertrucks. pic.twitter.com/rJzPBRT8XU
– Oliver Alexander (@OAlexanderDK) September 20, 2024
"You couldn't ask for better advertising for the Cybertruck," Kadyrov crowed.
Kadyrov is known for his uncompromising allegiance to Putin, so it's highly likely his claims about the Cybertrucks being sent as a "gift" are just bluster aimed at irritating the Ukraine-supporting Musk. Musk has been providing vital internet access to Ukrainians across the war-torn nation through SpaceX's Starlink satellites since Russia invaded.
Whether Musk indeed remotely disabled the trucks is another story, though. Considering the number of complaints from Cybertruck owners about quality issues, one explanation is that the vehicle simply broke down doing something it was never designed for.
Military experts previously expressed skepticism to the South China Morning Post about the Cybertruck's abilities on the frontlines. One analyst pointed out the obvious flaw in the report – "there are no Tesla outlets on the front lines in Donbas." The nearly $100,000 trucks are also not officially sold in Chechnya, and Western sanctions likely make procurement rather difficult.