BERLIN — German authorities are investigating the potential leak by Russian state media of a recorded phone call between senior military officials discussing lethal support for Ukraine.
The 38-minute recording captured Germany’s air force chief and three other officers deliberating the theoretical supply of long-range Taurus missiles to Kyiv. It’s a move German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has been reluctant to make, despite pressure from allies, citing fears it would risk Berlin’s direct involvement in the war.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Sunday described the eavesdropping as part of an “information war” waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“It’s a hybrid disinformation attack — it’s about division, it’s about undermining our unity,” Pistorius said Sunday.
“We must not fall for Putin’s tricks,” he said, adding that Germany will react prudently “but no less decisively” to the leak.
A spokesperson for the German Defense Ministry said Sunday that the military’s counterintelligence service would review whether communications were secure enough for such a sensitive conversation, which took place in February.
Audio of the call was first posted Friday on Telegram by Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT. According to German media reports, the officers used the U.S. communications platform Webex, with invitations for the session sent to their cellphones from an armed forces landline.
“Germany is preparing for war with Russia,” the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, said Sunday, also on Telegram. “Attempts to present the conversation … as a game of rockets and tanks are a malicious lie.”
The debate over Ukraine aid comes as a $60 billion U.S. assistance package is stalled in Congress, causing weapons and ammunition shortages on the front lines. But Scholz has long rejected calls, including from German politicians, to send Taurus missiles to the Ukrainian battlefield.
Last week, Scholz made clear that Germany wouldn’t be able to control what the missiles, which have a range of about 300 miles, would target, calling the systems “a very far-reaching weapon,” the Associated Press reported.
“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,” he said.
The remarks prompted a backlash from British lawmakers. Britain and France have sent long-range Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles to Ukraine.
Scholz’s suggestion that British and French personnel are operating cruise missiles delivered to Ukraine is “wrong, irresponsible and a slap in the face to allies,” Alicia Kearns, chair of the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said in response.
But in the phone call, the German officials refer to Britain as having “a few people on the ground” in Ukraine as part of the deployment of its Storm Shadow missiles.
The officers said the rapid delivery and deployment of Taurus missiles would only be possible with help from German troops. Germany could train Ukrainian forces to use the missiles, they said, but that would take months.
They also discussed whether the missiles could hit a key bridge over the Kerch Strait, which links Russia to the Crimean Peninsula, a territory it illegally annexed from Ukraine.
Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, the influential chair of Germany’s parliamentary defense committee, said Russia leaked the recording, where the officers discuss an attack on Russian-annexed territory, to deter Scholz from greenlighting the deliveries.
“Russia is afraid of the Taurus, precisely because it is so effective,” she said to Rheinische Post, a regional daily newspaper.
“Russia wants to prevent the Taurus from being delivered to Ukraine at all costs,” she said.
Morgunov reported from Kyiv.