“There is a consensus on this,” Olaf Scholz said when interviewed by German weekly Bild am Sonntag. While Ukraine’s Western allies decide to deliver increasingly heavy weapons, in particular tanks and long-range rockets, the German Chancellor made it clear, in an interview published on Sunday 5 February, that these deliveries should not be used to attack Russian territory. According to him, this point has been clarified and validated with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky.
The GLSDB (Ground Launched Small Diameter Bomb) rockets could almost double the range of action of the Ukrainian strike force, according to the Pentagon which announced on Friday that they would be included in a new package of American military aid. These small diameter devices fired from the ground can hit a target 150 kilometers away and thus threaten Russian positions behind the front lines.
Western-designed heavy tanks have also been promised to kyiv, which expects to receive “between 120 and 140” from different countries. Germany will deliver 14 Leopard 2 tanks taken from the equipment of its army. “German tanks threaten us again,” Vladimir Putin said on Thursday, drawing a parallel between his military campaign in Ukraine and the war against Nazism, on the occasion of 80 years of the Soviet victory against Hitler’s armies at Stalingrad. .
“His words are part of a series of absurd historical comparisons that he uses to justify his attack on Ukraine,” commented Olaf Scholz in Bild. “But there is no justification for this war,” he added.
“Together with our allies, we are providing battle tanks to Ukraine so that they can defend themselves. We carefully weighed each arms delivery, in close coordination with our allies, starting with America. This common approach makes it possible to avoid an escalation of the war”, assures the German Chancellor.
During the telephone exchanges he has had with the Russian president since the start of the conflict, Vladimir Putin has “not threatened” him personally, neither him nor Germany, specifies Olaf Scholz questioned on this point by Bild. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed in a documentary that the Russian president had “threatened” him by mentioning a “missile” launch. The Kremlin had refuted these allegations.
