Russia accuses Germany of planning to attack its territory

Russia has accused Germany of discussing plans to attack its territory after Kremlin-controlled media published a recording in which senior German air force personnel appeared to discuss supplying long-range missiles to Ukraine. Berlin has said the Russian accusations were absurd.

Dmitry Peskov, president Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, told reporters on Monday that the recorded call made it “more than obvious” that Germany’s military was “discussing substantive and specific plans to strike Russian territory”.

He added that “confirms once again that the countries of the collective west are being drawn into the conflict around Ukraine”.

Wolfgang Büchner, a German government spokesman, described the claim that Germany was preparing to wage war against Russia as “absurd, disgraceful Russian propaganda”.

Russian media published an audio recording last week purporting to be a virtual meeting of senior German air force officers in which they discussed how German long-range Taurus missiles could be used by Kyiv against Russian forces. They also talked about a potential strike by Ukrainian forces on a bridge linking mainland Russia to Crimea, Ukraine’s Russian-occupied peninsula.

The meeting included a discussion about whether Ukraine could deploy the Tauruses without the involvement of German soldiers, and how long Ukrainian servicemen would need to be trained to use them.

The intercept has caused a massive political storm in Germany, raising deep concern about the security of government communications. It has also reignited a row over whether Berlin should give Tauruses to Kyiv, which has experienced a string of setbacks on the battlefield in recent months amid shortages of western arms and stalled US aid.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz has ruled out the delivery of Tauruses, fearing it would lead to Germany becoming directly involved in the war. He said late last month that deploying them in Ukraine would require German “boots on the ground”, with German soldiers needed to programme the missiles.

The UK and France are already supplying Kyiv with their long-range missiles, Storm Shadow and Scalp, respectively.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, used the German recording to suggest that Berlin in fact supported sending troops from Nato countries to Ukraine — an idea floated by French president Emmanuel Macron last month which was rejected by Scholz and other members of the military alliance.

“German politicians are concerned about the leak online and the security of their conversations. That is to say, the fact German weapons and supporting personnel are being prepared to attack Russia [ . . . ] doesn’t surprise them,” Lavrov said at a conference in Moscow on Monday.

“That speaks volumes. Evidently they found the right words to legalise, if you will, the idea of sending ground troops from Nato countries” to Ukraine, he added.

Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister, said on Sunday that the Russian intercept was “part of an information war that Putin is waging”. “It is a hybrid disinformation attack. It is about dividing us. It is about undermining our unity,” he said.

Christian Wagner, spokesman for the German foreign ministry, said the intercept would be used domestically “to support this narrative about the aggressive west, and to distract from the fact that it’s Russia that has been waging a war of aggression against Ukraine for more than two years”.

Russia has also exploited the tapped conversation to suggest a split between Scholz and his generals over the issue of whether to supply Ukraine with Taurus missiles.

In his call with journalists on Monday, Peskov implied Scholz might not have been aware of the military’s discussions.

“We have yet to learn whether the Bundeswehr is doing this on its own initiative. So the issue is whether the Bundeswehr is under control and the extent to which Mr Scholz is in control of this situation, or whether it’s part of German state policy,” Peskov said.

Russia’s foreign ministry said it had summoned Germany’s ambassador, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, to demand an explanation for the military discussions recorded in the intercept. Peskov described the meeting as a “certain démarche”.

However the German foreign ministry spokesman Wagner said Graf Lambsdorff had not been summoned and the meeting in Moscow was long scheduled.