(Berlin) Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised on Saturday a “very thorough” investigation after the broadcast from Russia of confidential exchanges between several German officers on arms deliveries to Ukraine, the contents of which were extremely embarrassing for Berlin.
The German Defense Ministry has confirmed that a secret air force conversation was illegally wiretapped.
“According to our assessment, a conversation within the Air Force division was intercepted,” a spokeswoman told AFP.
And, while not giving 100% validation, she made a pretty clear connection to the leaked conversation: “We are not able to say with certainty whether any changes have been made to the recorded or transcribed version that is circulating on social media,” she added.
The controversy emerged after the broadcast, Friday in Russia on social networks, of the recording of a conversation between high-ranking German officers by videoconference.
The editor-in-chief of Russian state channel RT, Margarita Simonyan, published the file, more than half an hour long, presenting it as an exchange dated February 19.
Crimean Bridge
In this conversation, which AFP listened to, the participants speak in particular of the hypothesis of the delivery to Kyiv of long-range Taurus missiles, of German manufacture, of what would be necessary to allow the Ukrainian forces to use them and their possible impact.
The officers mentioned in particular the option of strikes targeting the Crimean bridge linking the Kerch peninsula and Russian territory, with one of them emphasizing that it would take between 10 and 20 missiles to overcome it. The Crimean peninsula was annexed in 2014 by Moscow.
PHOTO GUILLAUME SOUVANT, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
A Taurus missile
These exchanges, apparently preparatory to a briefing for the German government, place Berlin in an uncomfortable situation.
Because on the one hand, Germany has so far officially refused any delivery of Taurus missiles, despite them being loudly demanded by Kyiv, for fear of an escalation of the war. These devices have a range of more than 500 km and could reach Moscow.
In the recording, the participants also discuss details of the deliveries and use of long-range Scalp missiles supplied since last year by France and Great Britain to Ukraine.
This part of the eavesdropping is one of the most embarrassing for Berlin because it reveals secrets of allied countries. Olaf Scholz has already recently aroused irritation in Great Britain for having claimed that the British and the French were helping Ukrainian soldiers in handling these missiles and defining targets.
This is “a very serious matter and that is why it is now the subject of a very careful, very thorough and very rapid investigation,” declared the German Chancellor on the occasion of a visit to Rome.
The public television channel ARD speaks of a “disaster” for the German secret services, accused of carelessness in their security measures. According to the weekly Spiegel, the videoconference took place via the public platform WebEx, and not an ultra-secure internal network of the Luftwaffe.
“If this story is true, it would be highly problematic,” declared the chairman of the German parliamentary committee for monitoring the secret services, Konstantin von Notz, to the RND group newspapers.
“Sworn enemies”
On the Russian side, the head of diplomacy Sergei Lavrov, visiting Turkey, wanted to see in this affair the illustration “that the war camp in Europe is still very, very strong”.
The number two of the Russian Security Council, Dmitri Medvedev, judged on his Telegram account that “our long-time rivals, the Germans, have once again become our sworn enemies” and are preparing missile launches to strike the Russian “homeland”.
Many officials in Berlin see it as an operation by Moscow to influence the German debate on arms deliveries to Ukraine.
For the defense expert of the liberal FDP party, member of the government coalition, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, Moscow’s intention “is obvious”: to “intimidate” Olaf Scholz so that he does not reconsider his refusal to deliver of Taurus, she told the Funke press group.