German leader exposes divisions
Says country won’t give Kyiv Taurus missiles
DRESDEN, Germany — First, it was France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, who angered his NATO allies by suggesting that soon the West could be forced to send troops to Ukraine, portending a direct confrontation with Russian forces that the rest of the alliance has long rejected.
Then Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany took his turn, exposing new divisions. Trying to justify why Germany was withholding its most powerful missile, the Taurus, from Ukrainian hands, he hinted that Britain, France, and the United States may secretly be helping Ukraine target similar weapons, a step he said Germany simply could not take. While neither Britain nor France has commented officially — they almost never discuss how their weapons are deployed — Scholz was immediately accused by former officials of revealing war secrets.
“Scholz’s behavior has showed that as far as the security of Europe goes he is the wrong man in the wrong job at the wrong time,” Ben Wallace, Britain’s former defense minister, told The Evening Standard, a London daily. Tobias Ellwood, a Conservative who once chaired a key defense committee in the House of Commons, was widely quoted in the British press calling the statement “a flagrant abuse of intelligence.”
Coming in a week when Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened nuclear escalation if NATO troops entered the conflict, the tensions among Western allies underscored the ways they are struggling to maintain unity at a moment of apparent stalemate in the war and of flagging support, particularly in Washington.
For NATO, the challenge now is to find some combination of new weapons and financial support without prompting a direct confrontation with Putin, never knowing precisely where that line is. It is a particularly difficult dance for Scholz.
Germany has provided more arms and promised more aid to Ukraine than any nation bar the United States — but Scholz has drawn the line at the Taurus, whose powers, he fears, could particularly provoke Putin.
Scholz’s problems deepened over the weekend when an intercepted 38-minute phone conversation between Germany’s air force chief and other officers was published by Russian state media, making it clear there were contingency plans if Scholz changed his mind and decided to send the Taurus system after all. The leak was widely interpreted in Berlin to be a Russian operation meant to stoke opposition toward giving Ukraine more aid.
It triggered investigations in Berlin because the top officers were talking on an open line, giving the Russians an easy way to embarrass the German leader in front of NATO allies and before his own public at a moment when Germans remain hesitant about getting more deeply involved in the war.
Germany’s military confirmed the audio was authentic but did not comment on its contents, including a discussion of the need for German involvement in running the system if it were handed to Ukraine.
At most, Germany appears to have available about 100 Taurus missiles, which have a longer range than the Army Tactical Missile System that the United States has provided, the British Storm Shadow, or French SCALP missiles.
The European Parliament named the Taurus system among several that Ukraine needed in a nonbinding resolution that calls on all member nations to provide more weaponry. But it is far from clear that even if Germany did provide Taurus missiles to Ukraine, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has urged, it would make a decisive difference in the conflict.
Germany’s decision to send Leopard tanks last year did not enable Ukraine to mount a successful counteroffensive, and there are doubts about whether F-16 fighters, about to be delivered to Ukraine, will turn the battle now.
What Ukraine needs most, US officials say, is old-fashioned artillery shells to fend off inching Russian territorial advances and air defenses against missile and drone attacks.
The reason not to give Ukraine the Taurus is simple, Scholz told voters at a town hall event in Dresden, Germany, on Thursday. While Germany will provide $30 billion in arms to Ukraine in the coming years, the Taurus can strike at a distance of 500 kilometers, or 310 miles.
That would place Moscow at risk, and he made it clear he did not trust that Ukrainian forces could restrain themselves from bringing the war home to the Kremlin. Nor could Germany be seen as targeting Russia directly without itself risking direct confrontation with Moscow.
Scholz noted that Germany had given and pledged more weapons than almost any other country in the world, giving it “the right to often say yes, but also — sometimes — ‘not this time.’”
But what got him in the most trouble was his description of how advanced missile systems could not simply be handed over to Ukraine; he suggested they needed NATO forces to do the targeting of the complex weaponry.
He said it was one thing to give weapons to Ukraine and another for Germany to aim them at targets. “We must not be linked at any point or in any place to military targeting.”