In Berlin, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said that he discussed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky the issue of training the Ukrainian military to handle Taurus cruise missiles, TASS reported yesterday. “We have not yet agreed on that. I spoke with Zelensky about this. I spoke with the [ruling] coalition about this,” he said in an interview with the ARD television channel. “We have not yet begun this training),” he said, adding that “this has been and continues to be an option.”

“It has always been clear that if we supply Taurus’, these weapons will be operated not by the German military but by the Ukrainians, as in the case with other cruise missiles that are supplied from the United Kingdom and France,” Merz claimed. In his words, Taurus is “a very complicated system.”“At least six months are needed to train soldiers to operate them,” he said, adding that Berlin will not be announcing its military aid to Kiev publicly, to keep Moscow in the dark.