Pressure mounted on German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to send Taurus missiles to Ukraine as lawmakers from his governing coalition voted on Thursday (22 February) for a resolution to deliver “long-range weapon systems” to Ukraine.
While France and Britain have passed on their own long-range SCALP/Storm Shadow missiles to Ukraine, Chancellor Scholz (SPD, S&D) has mystified allies with his persistent reluctance to deliver equivalent German Taurus missiles.
Long-range weapons to strike behind enemy lines are among the most urgently needed weapons, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy emphasised at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) last weekend.
This sounds like it needs special programming and training to do so. So presumably German specialists would need to program and fire it at specific targets. Maybe that is where the hesitation by Scholz comes from, because then it wouldn't just be a proxy war, but Germans would again be launching weapons into Russia.