The German army is investigating an alleged wiretap of a conversation between several senior air force officers revealed on Friday by the Russian press, as concerns grow that it may not be a unique case.
“The Military Security Agency (BAMAD) has taken all necessary measures,” a spokeswoman for the German Ministry of Defense told T-Online.
According to sources in the weekly Der Spiegel, the ministry is alarmed by the possibility that the recorded conversation is real and that there have been other cases of eavesdropping on internal conversations within the armed forces.
Russian state TV channel RT (formerly Rossiya Segodnya) on Friday published a 30-minute audio recording in which the head of the German Air Force S. can allegedly be heard talking to several senior officers about the possibility of providing a Taurus missile to Ukraine.
The interlocutors are discussing, among other things, technical options for destroying the Kerch bridge connecting the Crimean peninsula with the mainland, or Russian weapons depots with these weapons, although they admit that there is no “green light” for this.
The release of the conversation comes at a particularly sensitive moment for Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government, which sparked controversy this week by saying Berlin could not hand over the Taurus to Ukraine at the risk of becoming directly involved in the conflict.
Scholz claims that Kyiv will not be able to operate these systems without the help of German soldiers – a “red line” for Berlin – but the audio recording published by RT appears to contradict this assertion.
According to Der Spiegel’s sources, the German Ministry of Defense assumes that the sound is real and has not been manipulated by artificial intelligence tools.
Apparently, the conversation, which, according to RT, took place on January 19, was conducted not over a secure line, but through the WebEx video conferencing platform, with one of the participants connecting via mobile phone.
“If this story is confirmed, it will be a very problematic event,” said the president of the Green parliamentary control group of the Bundestag (lower house of parliament), Konstantin von Notz.
“The question that arises is whether this is an isolated event or a structural safety issue. I hope this issue will be clarified urgently,” van Notz told RND on Friday.
In Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova publicly asked her German counterpart Annalena Bärbock to explain the contents of the audio recording.
Meanwhile, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev drew parallels with World War II and said it was impossible to “react diplomatically” to such a revelation, ending his message with a call for “the death of the Nazi occupiers.”