Germany gives Ukraine green light to attack Russia with Western weapons

According to the report of the international group Tasnim news agency, quoted by the “Spiegel” weekly, Ukraine has so far It has not been allowed to shoot at targets in Russia with Western military equipment.

According to SPIEGEL, the German federal government has now decided to reduce this restriction for Ukraine. According to this report, this decision is the result of the recent increase in Russian attacks in the Kharkiv border region. For a long time, Kiev has been trying to get permission to fire Western weapons on Russian soil so that it can directly attack Russian facilities across the border. : Germany has agreed with Ukraine that the weapons we supply will be used in accordance with international laws. In recent weeks, Russia has prepared, coordinated and carried out attacks from positions in the Russian border region, especially in the Kharkiv region. Hebstreit said: We have reached an agreement together that Ukraine has the right to defend itself against these attacks according to international law. He emphasized that this change of position is not an individual German effort. The US government had previously quietly allowed Ukraine to use US weapons on a limited scale against targets on Russian soil. Politico news magazine and CNN reported on Thursday that this only applies to counterattacks in the defense of the city of Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine.

The Kremlin immediately reacted to these Western positions. RIA news agency reported that Moscow has announced that it will respond asymmetrically to Ukraine’s attacks on its territory with US-supplied weapons. In this regard, this news agency referred to the words of “Andrey Kartapolov, the head of the Defense Committee of the Parliament of this country. Asymmetric attacks are attacks in which different tools are used and different targets are chosen compared to the targets used by the other side.

After the recent attacks and bombings in the city of Kharkiv near the Ukrainian border, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has called for the right to use Western weapons against Russian soil, and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has been trying almost every day recently slow to at least partially lift existing restrictions on attacks in Ukraine.

French President Emmanuel Macron has a similar view: after the German chancellor met with Macron on Wednesday, speculation about whether the federal government Germany has changed its position on the question that Ukraine can also use German weapons to attack targets in Russia. Schultz, unlike before, commented very calmly, pointing out that Ukraine has this right under international law has to attack Russian positions if fired from there.

Government circles say that Schultz and other representatives of the German federal government have avoided giving clear answers to relevant questions in the past few days, so that the United States Do not pressure the United States of America. The White House and the US State Department spent days trying to find common ground on the sensitive issue. Apparently, Berlin did not want to block the decision in the United States and did not want to increase the pressure on the US President Joe Biden, so the federal government apparently waited for a message from Washington before giving the unequivocal green light to this development of the use of German weapons on Friday morning. show it to Ukraine.

The German opposition looks at this issue with a critical view and opposes it. Janine Whistler, the leader of the German Left Party, said before announcing this decision of the government coalition known as Traffic Light: The opposition criticizes this issue. He added: I ask Olaf Schultz, the chancellor of Germany, to clearly reject the request to use Western weapons on Russian soil.” He called the requests to allow this “irresponsible and very dangerous”. hitting Russia will increase the risk of an incalculable escalation of this war. Sahra Wagenknecht, the founder of BSW, gave a similar warning and said: “For two years, we have been crossing red lines one after another.” and we are becoming more and more a war party.

Now, in principle, it can be imagined that the Ukrainians can launch attacks on Russian soil using the weapons provided by Germany. The German military has said in recent days that both the 2000 self-propelled howitzer and the Mars II rocket launcher are suitable for such an operation used by Germany in Kharkiv region. However, according to the German military, these have not yet been used near the front line.

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