Germany attributes the leak of confidential audios about Ukraine to a personal error |

Germany is trying to reduce the scope of the leak of confidential audio from its army about the war in Ukraine. The Government has wanted to present as an isolated episode the disclosure by Russia of conversations between senior German military commanders regarding the hypothetical shipment of Taurus missiles to Ukraine, which the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, refuses to supply. “Our communication systems were not compromised,” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stated this Tuesday after the first investigations. “The reason why the telephone call in the ranks of the German Air Force could be recorded was due to an individual error,” she indicated about the recording broadcast last Friday by the editor-in-chief of the Russian state channel. Russia TodayMargarita Simonián, close to Moscow’s ruling elite.

The intercept of the conversation in which members of the German army are heard talking about the possible shipment of Taurus missiles to Ukraine and their use to attack the Crimean bridge, the invaded country’s peninsula illegally annexed by Russia in 2014, was possible thanks to the fact that one of the participants, who was at the time in a hotel in Singapore, did not follow “the secure dialing procedure” prescribed by the authorities. “It was connected through an unauthorized connection, that is, through an open connection,” detailed the minister, who also insisted that German communication systems are secure “if all requirements are applied correctly.” “There is no doubt about that,” he added.

The minister has thus tried to dispel the fears of some NATO countries regarding the possibility that Germany has a structural security problem and that this leak is just the tip of the iceberg.

The conference call was conducted through a commonly used application. “As you know, we use Webex to make calls up to a certain level of confidentiality, but not the public Webex platform, which is accessible to everyone, but a variant certified for official use, which is the usual practice, with security levels additional and as long as the classification of the content allows the use of this form of Webex,” he explained.

“The Webex service, and this is also important to emphasize here, is hosted in German army data centers. Servers abroad are not used,” Pistorius clarified, aware of some information published in recent days that suggested that this could have been the failure. The minister also pointed out that at the time of the conversation, the Singapore Airshow was being held, an aeronautical industry fair that was also attended by “senior military commanders from European partner states.”

Feast for the Kremlin

For the Russian intelligence services, such an event was “a real feast.” In the vicinity of this trade fair there were selective and exhaustive listening operations. Being able to access the call on Webex was probably a “stroke of luck as part of a broadly diversified approach,” Pistorius said, while ruling out that a Russian spy or other unauthorized person had connected to the call.

The publication of the conversation between the senior commanders of the German army has unleashed an exchange of accusations between Moscow and Berlin in recent days. Germany accuses Russia of carrying out an “information war”, something Pistorius insisted on again this Tuesday. “We will not let this hybrid attack from Russia scare us or separate us,” he warned.

“Russia promotes and tries, not only here, to open a gap between us, between the internal political forces of Germany, between the parties, between those who are for or against supporting Ukraine less or more. All this is a perfidious game that [Vladímir] Putin is playing here and we must not fall for it,” said the social democratic politician.

Likewise, the minister has reported that he has held various conversations with Germany’s partners in which they have assured him that everyone is aware of the danger of this type of attack and knows that “100% protection cannot be guaranteed.” In his opinion, there is no ally who has not had at least one incident of this type in the last 20 years. “So, from that point of view, there would be no espionage if espionage were not possible for whatever reason,” he concluded.

Germany has been warning for months about Putin’s hybrid war to destabilize European countries and the danger of underestimating all its options. For German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the leak issue shows “that the Russian war of aggression is not only waged with bombs, missiles, drones and the worst attacks against the civilian population in Ukraine.” There is also “a war of narratives,” she declared this Tuesday in a meeting with her Bosnia-Herzegovina counterpart, Elmedin Konakovic, in Sarajevo.

To fight this war of disinformation, it will be necessary to reinforce protection measures against espionage, something that, according to the German Ministry of the Interior, has been done in recent times and that is expected to be analyzed at a special meeting of the German Defense Commission. Bundestag convened for next Monday.

This is not the first time a Russian spy scandal has rocked Germany. Last December, a high-profile trial began against two accused of having delivered information from the German foreign secret services (BND) to the Russian national intelligence service FSB after the start of the war in Ukraine.

Furthermore, a few days ago new evidence came to light suggesting that Jan Marsalek, a former member of the board of directors of Wirecard and considered the “mastermind” of the largest post-war fraud in Germany, allegedly worked for years for the Russian secret services. , who would have supported him in his escape and living in hiding. According to information to which German media such as The mirror or ZDF television, the former director was part of an intelligence cell whose capabilities and competencies were used by the Russian intelligence services.

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