Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been deeply embarrassed by the leak through Russia of recordings showing senior German officers discussing assistance to Ukraine in the use of Taurus cruise missiles. For Scholz’s critics, the “eavesdropping scandal” is yet another proof of German ambivalence about support for Ukraine.
For months, Ukraine has been requesting the delivery of this type of advanced missile with a range of more than five hundred kilometers. The United Kingdom and France have previously provided similar equipment. Just last week, after a Ukraine summit in Paris, Scholz explicitly explained why he is reluctant to make the Taurus available: Germany would become too much of a party to the war with Russia. The missiles would, he suggested, require German help in identifying targets, perhaps even on the ground in Ukraine itself.
The officers seem to confirm exactly that in the recording. They are discussing the possibility of using a Taurus to attack the Crimean bridge, which connects Russia and the Ukrainian peninsula annexed in 2014. The recording was published late on Friday evening on social network Telegram by the editor-in-chief of Russian state channel RT, Margarita Simonyan. According to her, the discussion between the officers was on February 19. There was talk of a German visit to the Ukrainian forces a few days later. According to the German authorities, the recording is authentic. However, it is “not possible to say with certainty” whether the sound fragments were deliberately cut.
Webex meeting platform
Scholz immediately announced an investigation from the Vatican, where he was visiting, on Saturday. “This is a very serious matter,” he said. “That is why it is now being clarified very carefully, very intensively and very quickly.” According to the magazine’s website Der Spiegel the officers would not have spoken via secure connections, but via the relatively open online meeting platform Webex. Opposition politician Roderich Kiesewetter (CDU) therefore fears that the Russians have “even more material” that will also be served up at a time that suits Moscow. Espionage “is part of the toolbox for hybrid warfare,” he told the commercial channel N-TV.
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It is not only the opposition that is critical. There are also concerns within the government coalition of SPD, FDP and Greens about what FDP politician Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann calls German “naivety”. “We urgently need to improve our security and spy defenses because we are clearly vulnerable in this area,” she said. Strack-Zimmermann is chairman of the Defense Committee in the Bundestag. “It must become clear as soon as possible whether this eavesdropping scandal is a one-off event or a structural problem,” said chairman Konstantin von Notz (Greens) of the parliamentary committee for the intelligence services.
After the United States, no country has sent as many weapons to Ukraine as Germany since 2022. According to the Kiel Institute, that deliveries are conscientious keeps track, this concerns equipment worth 17.7 billion euros. France, militarily the most important EU member state, is stuck with around 600 million euros in weapons in this overview. It says it supplies a lot through a European fund, the European Peace Facility, which means that the Kiel figures turn out differently at country level.
No NATO-Russia war
Yet last week, after a Ukraine summit in Paris convened by French President Emmanuel Macron, the impression emerged that Germany was the country that had to come to the rescue. The summit was intended to radiate European unity, but it painfully exposed how divided the two most important EU countries were.
Macron said, in response to questions from journalists, that he could not completely rule out sending troops to Ukraine in the long term, after which Scholz used all means to make it clear that this could not be the case under any circumstances. Between the lines, he seemed to reveal that the French and the British have long been present in Ukraine because of their missile deliveries. Macron in turn mocked countries that see the supply of “sleeping bags and helmets” as military support – a reference to the first German aid two years ago.
“We do not want a war between Russia and NATO,” Scholz said on Saturday, after his audience with the Pope, at a meeting of European social democrats in Rome. “And we will do everything we can to prevent that.”