Bundestag eyes increasing pressure on chancellor regarding deliveries of Taurus missiles to Kyiv

Member of the Bundestag from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Roderich Kiesewetter plans to come up with a parliamentary initiative to increase pressure on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the supply of Taurus long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine, Report informs referring to TASS.

“Now that some representatives of the Social Democratic Party of Germany are also in favor of the supply, we should think about a parliamentary initiative to increase pressure on the chancellor’s office,” the politician said.

Thus, representatives of the CDU bloc and the Christian Social Union, as well as the SPD, the Green Party and the Free Democratic Party could jointly call on the chancellor to supply weapons,” he said.

Social Democratic Party foreign policy expert Nils Schmid didn’t rule out the possibility of delivering such missiles to Kyiv in the future, either. Nevertheless, according to his assessment, “two conditions have not yet been met” for this: the US has not supplied Ukrainians with similar weapons, and the issue of training the Ukrainian military to manage them also remains open. Schmid stressed that the German military cannot direct missiles at targets instead of the Ukrainians, as this would be tantamount to “participation in the war.”

Sources in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper noted that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy discussed with Scholz during a visit to Berlin on May 14 the issue of transferring Taurus, which Kyiv “would like to receive urgently.”

Taurus are considered to be an analogue of the British-French Storm Shadow, which have already been delivered to Ukraine. However, the range of the German-Swedish missiles is slightly longer.