Aug. 26 (UPI) — U.S. tech billionaire Elon Musk was awarded Ukraine’s highest civilian honor for nationals of another country Friday in recognition of his work to defend Ukrianian lives and liberty and strengthening U.S.-Ukrainian ties.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in a decree said the “entrepreneur, engineer, head of SpaceX and Tesla,” was being given the Order of Freedom award “for outstanding personal merits in protecting people’s lives and freedom, and developing relations between the peoples of Ukraine and the United States of America.”

The honor puts Musk in the company of British Prime Minister Andy Burnham, French President Emmanual Macron and Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda, all of whom are recent Order of Freedom recipients.

Wednesday’s announcement came after Musk shipped terminals for his Starlink satellite Internet constellation to Ukraine to keep the country online in the early stages of the war amid damage and destruction of the country’s terrestrial Internet infrastructure by invading Russian forces and more recently threw a wrench into Russia’s battlefield communications by cutting them off from Starlink.

Russia had been accessing the service without authorization.

Musk flipped the switch Feb. 1 at the request of former Ukrainian Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov amid reports Russian forces were, among other uses, deploying the units aboard “First Person View” attack drones and using the real time video feed to mount increasingly precise and deadly strikes.

The move has been credited with giving the Ukrainians an advantage of the battlefield and helping impede the advance of Russian forces.

However, Musk has also publicly criticized Zelensky in numerous instances and queried Ukraine’s approach to the war, including the way its military has used Starlink with Musk arguing it should be for cimmunications purposes only and not to mount long-range strikes deep inside Russia that he said risked escalating hostilities.

“For now, Musk has said that this would be an escalation. But he may change his mind when he sees more arguments,” Zelensky told journalists at the weekend.