BEJING, March 5. /TASS/. The leaked audio of a conversation between German military leaders discussing the options for attacking the Crimean Bridge may add fuel to the Ukraine conflict, a Chinese expert warned.
"If the recording is confirmed to be fact, which means it offers clear evidence of the direct involvement of Germany in the conflict, it will certainly result in an escalation of the Russia-Ukraine conflict," the Global Times quoted Cui Heng, a scholar from the National Institute for SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization - TASS) International Exchange and Judicial Cooperation, as saying.
According to Cui, Germany could firmly reject the recording as "it will not be willing to engage in any direct conflict with Russia," for any escalation to direct confrontation with Russia "doesn’t conform to the interests of the US and the West" either, he concluded.
On March 1, RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan said that on the very day when German Chancellor Olaf 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. 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.