WASHINGTON, March 5. /TASS/. The United States is seeking to manipulate public opinion by means of accusing Russia of trying to sow discord among NATO countries via making public telephone talks between German officers, Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov said.

"Local authorities are once again trying to manipulate public opinion. Speaking of the "leak" of the content of the Bundeswehr officers’ conversation, they reduce everything to accusing us of some kind of "hybrid" and hacker attacks," he said in a statement that was posted on the embassy’s Telegram channel. "Thus, they try to divert the discussion from the key point. Namely, the fact that the United States and their NATO satellites are sinking deeper into the quagmire of the 'Ukrainian project.' That the discussions casually include options of how to carry out a terrorist attack on civilian infrastructure on the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation."

RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said on March 1 that on the very day that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was giving public assurances that NATO was not now and would not in the future be directly involved in the Ukraine conflict, Germany’s top brass was in fact mulling how to carry out a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge in a way 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. She later released a transcript of it, which makes it clear that the military officers discussed the Taurus missiles’ capability to hit and destroy the Crimean Bridge and the tactical details involved in preparing such an attack.

On March 4, the Russian Foreign Ministry delivered a demarche to German Ambassador to Moscow Alexander Lambsdorff and demanded explanations of the circumstances of the leaked conversation.