Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said that a thorough investigation would be carried out by Germany after a recording of confidential army talks on Ukraine surfaced on social media, Reuters reported.
Scholz said that the lead was serious and it would be clarified very intensively, carefully and quickly.
German defence officials have told AFP that they believe that the conversation was “intercepted.”
The audio file surfaced recently when Margarita Simonyan, a Russian state TV journalist and the head of Russia Today, posted the track on her Telegram channel and claimed that German officials were “discussing how to strike the Crimea bridge”, which connects Russia to the Ukrainian peninsula.
The discussion also talks about the possibility of supplying Taurus cruise missiles to Kyiv, which Ukrainian officials have asked time and again, but Germany has refused to provide.
The 38-minute recording has not been verified as yet for its authenticity.
German media has described the lead as “catastrophic” for German intelligence. According to reports in Der Spiegel magazine, the video conference was not carried out on a secret internal army network.
Russia has lashed out at Germany. Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, said that the recording shows that Ukraine and its backers “want to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield”. Moscow has also called upon Germany to provide an explanation on the issue.
Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Telegram: “Our age-old rivals – the Germans – have again turned into our sworn enemies.”
German politicians have expressed concerns across party lines.
Roderich Kiesewetter, a conservative from Germany’s opposition said that he expected more such recordings to surface in days to come.
In an interview with Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper, Kiesewetter said, “Russia, of course, is demonstrating how actively it uses espionage and sabotage as part of its hybrid warfare. It is to be expected that much more has been intercepted and leaked in order to influence decisions, discredit and manipulate people.”
