BERLIN, March 4. /TASS/. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz again confirmed his refusal to send Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, as he ruled out such deliveries, saying that they would require the presence of German military personnel.
While on a trip to the city of Sindelfingen in southwestern Germany, the German head of government dismissed such a debate as strange, according to the DPA news agency. "A very long-range weapons system cannot be supplied without thinking how it can be controlled. And if you want the control and if that is possible only with the participation of the German military, these [deliveries] are totally ruled out," Scholz emphasized. "I made it very clear. I am the Chancellor, so this is valid," he added.
However, the German chancellor did not comment on the leaked recording of a recent conversation between four senior members of Germany’s top brass who discussed the options for carrying out an attack on the Crimean Bridge using the Taurus.
On March 1, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said that on the very day when Scholz gave assurances that NATO was not now and would not in the future be directly involved in the Ukraine conflict, high-ranking German military officers were in fact mulling how to carry out a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge in a way that that would have no repercussions for Berlin by giving it the cover of plausible deniability. Simonyan said she had a corroborating audio recording of the Bundeswehr officers’ conversation in her possession, but did not release it.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov lambasted the leaked conversation at a news conference following the Antalya Diplomacy Forum as a 'blatant revelation.'
Scholz has repeatedly emphasized that he opposed handing Taurus cruise missiles over to Ukraine, citing the risk of Berlin getting dragged into the conflict. If used incorrectly, the weapons can hit a designated target somewhere in Moscow, the chancellor argued in a recent encounter with members of the public in Dresden.