Germany will not deliver Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said from Granada, following a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the sidelines of the European Council Summit. However, Berlin intends to provide Kiev with another Patriot anti-aircraft system.

“This is the most necessary thing now,” Scholz said, noting that Russia is expected to try again this winter to hit Ukrainian infrastructure with missiles and drones. For his part, Zelensky wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he had a “fruitful” meeting with the German chancellor and that he was grateful for Germany’s support. “It’s about protecting Europe and common values,” he said.

Olaf Scholz had been heavily criticised recently – even by members of his own party, the SPD – for his reluctance to send Ukraine the state-of-the-art German-Swedish-built long-range air-to-ground Taurus long-range missile system. In the past, he had again rejected such a request, fearing a further escalation of the war if targets within Russian territory were hit.

The newspaper BILD published that the Chancellery, after consulting experts and lawyers, had made the decision not to send Taurus – at least not in the short term.

According to Der Spiegel magazine, Scholz had already informed Zelensky of his intentions during their recent meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. This was preceded by a thorough examination of the possibility that the Taurus system might be seen as an excessive German involvement in the war since the operation of Taurus requires the supply of target data and also geodata for the calculation of the trajectory, which would be very difficult to achieve without German support. These missiles “are not as easy to program as a coffee maker”, Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said a few weeks ago. The minister is, however, seen as a proponent of delivering the Taurus to Kiev after careful consideration of the technical details.

As Spiegel reports, the chancellor last week explained to a closed meeting of the Bundestag’s Foreign Affairs Committee the reasons why Germany is more cautious than, for example, the US or the UK, noting that these countries take a more relaxed approach to the issue of granting geodata and the presence of their soldiers in Ukraine.

The chancellor’s reservations, the magazine notes, mainly concern the possibility of Ukrainian forces hitting occupied areas in the east of the country with their Taurus, as well as targets inside Russia. BILD even refers specifically to the possibility of German weapons being used to destroy the Kerch Bridge, which links Russia with annexed Crimea.