German Opposition calls for emergency meeting over leaked conversation

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: Agencies
3 Mar 2024 23:22

The faction requested German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to attend the meeting.

The German Parliament, photographed on Nov.22, 2024 (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Germany's opposition coalition, which comprises the Christian Democratic and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), called for an emergency meeting of the parliament's defense committee over the publication after a Russian news agency leaked details of a conversation between high-ranking German military officers.

"On behalf of my faction ... I ask to immediately convene a special meeting of the defense committee," the Opposition's secretary, Thorsten Frei, was quoted as saying in a letter to the president of the Bundestag, Barbel Bas, by German broadcaster NTV.

The faction also requested German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to attend the meeting.

What did the leak reveal?

On Friday, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya media group broadcasted a leaked conversation among four German military officers.

They were discussing a potential attack on the Crimean Bridge using long-range Taurus missiles, a weapon that the German Parliament previously voted not to supply to Kiev.

Interestingly, the way it was being discussed insinuated that it had already been agreed upon.

The officers also discussed means of maintaining plausible deniability so that Germany could tread as closely as possible to the "red line" of direct involvement without crossing it.

On Saturday, Scholz announced that a thorough investigation into the matter has been launched.

Earlier today, Boris Pistorius, the German Defense Minister stated that preliminary results should be underway by next week.

Fears of complicity

The Taurus missile is launched from a fighter jet and has a warhead weighing nearly half a ton against a fortified target up to 310 miles (about 500 kilometers) away, almost equivalent to the UK-made Storm Shadow cruise missiles. This means that the Taurus missile can hit the Russian capital, Moscow, which is about 450 kilometers away from the border with Ukraine.

At an editorial conference of the German news agency DPA last week, Scholz explained that he hesitates to supply Ukraine with Taurus missiles to avoid the risk of escalating the war or dragging Germany and NATO into it.

Meanwhile, the UK and France have already committed to supplying long-range missiles to Ukraine, namely Storm Shadow and Scalp long-range missiles respectively.

"What is being done in the way of target control and accompanying target control on the part of the British and the French can’t be done in Germany. Everyone who has dealt with this system knows that," Scholz said.