German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has once again spoken out against the supply of long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine, citing their ?special range? and the fact that there is no particular need for it.
@lusterko The Germans are ducking worthless. Paid off by Putin with the pipeline. It was a mistake to let them re-unify. They should remember when the Soviets occupied their country
Yet again Germany continues to be all over the map when it comes to being of any help. I’m an American so it’s not like I get to speak on behalf of Ukraine or Ukrainians, but I do find it funny that their defense minister says “the Americans have also not provided long range missles” without pointing to the countless millions of dollars in ammo, billions in Artillery, the array of tanks and IFVs we’ve provided the training, the strong arming of other governments, the rounding of support from NATO for Ukraine, providing Patriots, and continuing to provide other logistics. Germany wants to claim giving them anti middle defense systems and some training as doing anything of value. The battle isn’t for Ukraine to stay where it is, the battle is to push forward and retake land. Give them what they need. I swear Germany is inevitably going to start WWIII (their streak continues) simply because they refuse to beat back Russia and stop a war immediately. I’d love to be peaceful and for us to not have to blow up other humans, but Ukraine doesn’t get that luxury right now and so I will do and allow things I’m not as comfortable with.
I was hoping Germany was on track to start taking a leading role in the crisis but it doesn’t look like it. They have the excuse that the UK is providing Storm Shadow missiles so why not use that as an excuse?
They don't need any excuse. What they actually need is existing stuff to send to Ukraine...
Germany bought ~600 cruise missile nearly 20 years ago. Firing them is part of pilot training. The people telling you how they could make 450+ missiles fired in the last two decades usable again either believe in magic and fairy dust or are just straight out lying to you to make the government look bad (for basically every German source its the latter).
Also Storm Shadow has the same > 500km range. They got restricted for export to less range to not break export treaties regarding long range missiles.
But Germany doesn't export theirs to countries like India, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or Egypt like France did. So there is no limited range export version or a normal production procedure to limit them to not break international treaties.
So this whole discussion is Germany refusing to build modifications from scratch for the few of their remaining ~150 missiles they could actually spare... for no actual reason than to stop the "Germany bad!"-narratives that will never stop anyway as you are just falling for the next narrative again and again and again.
The taurus is a bunker buster not a ordinary cruise missile. And to my knowledge Russians aren’t hiding in bunkers with 3 meters Reinforced concrete on top…
Also its kinda capable of striking the Kremlin directly so not exactly deescalating…
No difference to Storm Shadow here. Both are indeed mostly identical as they are parallel developments based on the same original French-German cruise missile project (APACHE). They even share the same inside joke of constructing rediculous acronyms for their bunker breaching warhead ("BROACH"/"MEPHISTO").
The actual difference is that while both have ranges >500km there is a limited range export version of Storm Shadow/Scalp (France exports to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, India, Egypt and others) not violating international export restrictions (thus the producers have a tested and certified way to limit the range) but none for Taurus.
No, Germany will not export 500km range missiles with a warhead of that size. No one will, because there are treaties (to limit tech that can be used for long-range nuclear/chemical weapons) to prevent this. They will also not have the producers develop, test and roll out modifications to limit the range of a few for export when they only own 150 in total. Everything else is just the usual propaganda narrative (including German opposition pretending there are 450 more that can be made available quickly... sure, they bought 600 originally nearly 20 years ago, did the usual pilot training with live ammunition for nearly two decades yet magically those missile weren't used but sit somewhere on a shelf...)
Add comment