German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has announced that Berlin could decide on providing Ukraine with Taurus long-range cruise missiles within one to two weeks.
He added that the delay in the decision-making is not due to distrust or hesitation but that it stems from Berlin’s need to carefully consider the consequences of each move.
"It’s not about trust but about protection. We have pledged not to endanger the German people. That’s our mission,” according to Pistorius.
The Zelensky regime has been pressing Germany for the delivery of the missiles, which have a range of 500 kilometers (311 miles) and can strike deep inside Russian territory.
Kiev’s pressure can be explained by the fact that the Zelensky regime wants to distract public attention from Ukraine’s bungled counteroffensive, Eugen Schmidt, a member of the Bundestag, told Sputnik.
According to him, Kiev wants to blame some circumstances that purportedly prevented its counteroffensive from making progress, which is why the Zelensky regime turned to the “media” issue of Taurus supplies.
“I think that at the end of the day, Berlin will okay the Taurus deliveries, which, however, will fail to have any significant impact on the course of the Ukraine conflict,” Schmidt stressed.
On the other hand, he did not rule out that Kiev receiving the missiles might result in the escalation of the situation, a possible scenario that he said prods German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to drag his feet on the decision-making.
When asked why the issue remains on the German government’s table even though a recent poll revealed that at least 52% of respondents oppose the Taurus supplies to Kiev, Schmidt noted that “in terms of Berlin’s military support for the Ukraine conflict, the German leadership never relied on public opinion.”
He added that currently, one can see Berlin make “inconvenient decisions for the sake of those forces overseas that are now in control of the German foreign policy," in a veiled reference to the US.
Schmidt was partly echoed by Dmitry Evstafiev, a Moscow-based political scientist and economics university professor, who told Sputnik that Kiev getting the Taurus missiles won’t affect the course of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
“So these missiles, of course, are not for a counteroffensive; Kiev needs them to politically show its military capability, survive the autumn-winter period, and then (in February-March 2024) begin to beg for new weapons and new funding to launch a possible new advance,” Evstafiev said.
He added that the Kiev regime “wants to maximally drag the collective West, above all, the United States and Germany into the black hole of supporting Ukraine."
“It’s clear that after four months of the botched counteroffensive, Kiev is returning to its previous strategy of waging a political war with the sole purpose of maintaining support from the West,” the analyst underscored.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this month that Kiev’s advance, which kicked off on June 4, was “a failure rather than a stalemate”. According to him, the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ counteroffensive claimed the lives of more than 71,000 Ukrainian troops, also leading to the destruction of over 500 tanks and thousands of other armored vehicles.