The German Armed Forces are investigating an alleged eavesdropping on a conversation between several high-ranking Air Force officers made public on Friday by Russian media, while alarm is spreading over the possibility that it is not the only case. “The Agency for Military Protection Service (BAMAD) has taken all necessary measures,” a spokesperson for the Ministry of Defense told the digital media T-online.
According to sources from the weekly Der Spiegel, the Ministry is alarmed at the possibility that the recorded conversation is real and that other eavesdropping on the internal conversations of the Armed Forces has occurred. The Russian state channel RT published an audio of about 30 minutes in which the head of the German Air Force, Ingo Gerhartz, is supposedly heard talking with several officers about the possibility of supplying Taurus missiles to Ukraine.
The interlocutors address, among other issues, the technical options to destroy with this weapon the Kerch bridge, which connects the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, illegally occupied by Russia, to the mainland, or Russian weapons depots. According to Der Spiegel’s sources, the German Ministry of Defense assumes that the audio is real and has not been manipulated with artificial intelligence tools.
Structural problem?
Apparently, the conversation – which according to RT took place on January 19 – did not take place over a secure line, but rather through the WebEx video conferencing platform, while one of the participants connected by mobile phone. “If this story is confirmed, it would be a highly problematic event,” declared the president of the parliamentary control group of the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament), the green Konstantin von Notz.
References are also made in the audio to the United Kingdom having “some people on the ground” in Ukraine, a deployment related to the delivery of Storm Shadow missiles.
«Here the question arises as to whether this is a one-time event or a structural safety problem. I hope it will be clarified urgently,” said Von Notz, in conversation with the German news agency RND. In Moscow, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Zajarova, publicly asked the German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, for explanations about the content of the audio.
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