UK troops 'on the ground' in Ukraine, German leaks reveal
4 Min Read
The leak details how British forces collaborate with Ukraine on deploying Storm Shadow missiles against targets up to 150 miles behind Russian lines.
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Ukrainian recruits under the guidance of British soldiers train at an army camp in South West England, Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. The recruits were being instructed on urban warfare. (AP)
Germany faces another setback as leaked information from Russia claims the presence of British soldiers in Ukraine, assisting Kiev's forces by firing long-range Storm Shadow missiles.
According to the Kremlin, this information indicates that the West is directly involved in the war. British defense officials have, on their part, expressed outrage over the leak.
On Friday, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya media group broadcasted a leaked conversation between 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 the plan was being discussed insinuated that it had already been agreed upon.
The leak further detailed how British forces collaborated with Ukraine on deploying Storm Shadow missiles against targets up to 150 miles behind Russian lines.
"When it comes to mission planning," Lt Gen Ingo Gerhartz, the head of the German Air Force Luftwaffe says in the leaks, "I know how the English do it, they do it completely in reachback. They also have a few people on the ground, they do that, the French don’t."
"Reachback" is a military concept that denotes the transfer of intelligence, equipment, and support from rear areas to units stationed at the front. Gerhartz suggests that the British strategy goes beyond this to include on-site support.
According to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, the discussions "once again highlight the direct involvement of the collective West in the conflict in Ukraine." But Germany's Defense Minister Boris Pistorius dismissed the leaks as part of a Russian plot to wage "an information war."
Read more: Scholz, a snitch? UK accuses Germany for 'flagrant abuse of intel'
The Guardian said in a report that it suspects the conversation to have been recorded by Russian actors.
Tobias Ellwood, a former junior defense minister in the UK, told the BBC that the leak was embarrassing for Berlin, but he remarked that Russia likely had prior knowledge of British presence, considering the extensive nature of its surveillance operations.
However, that should "not prevent some serious conversations taking place in the diplomatic corridors between Germany and Britain and indeed NATO, as well as to why this happened in the first place," Ellwood said.
The UK last week confirmed the presence of a "small number of personnel" in Ukraine, but it did not detail the nature of the tasks they were undertaking amid concerns of escalations with Moscow.
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.
Read more: German Opposition calls for emergency meeting over leaked conversation
