Germany blames leak of classified audio on Ukraine on personal error | International

Germany is trying to reduce the scope of the leak of confidential audio from its military about the war in Ukraine. The government wanted to present as an isolated incident Russia’s disclosure of conversations between senior German military commanders regarding the hypothetical shipment of Taurus missiles to Ukraine, which German Chancellor Olaf Scholz refuses to provide. “Our communications systems have not been compromised,” Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on Tuesday after the initial investigation. “The reason why it was possible to record the phone call in the ranks of the German Air Force was due to an individual error,” he said of 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 interception of the conversation in which the German army is heard talking about the possible shipment of Taurus missiles to Ukraine and their use to attack the Crimean bridge, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally annexed by Russia, was possible thanks to one of the participants, who was in a Singapore hotel at the time, did not follow “the secure call procedure” prescribed by the authorities. “The connection took place via an unauthorized connection, i.e. via an open connection,” explained the minister, who also insisted that German communication systems are safe “if all requirements are applied correctly.” “There is no doubt about this,” he added.

The minister thus attempted to dispel the fears raised in 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 via 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 additional levels of security and as long as the content rating allows this form of Webex to be used,” he explained.

“The Webex service, and this is also important to underline, is hosted in the German army’s data centers. The servers abroad are not used”, clarified Pistorius, aware of some information published in recent days which suggested that this could have been the fault. The minister also underlined that at the time of the meeting the Singapore Airshow, an aeronautical industry fair in which “senior military commanders of European partner states” also participated.

Party for the Kremlin

For the Russian secret services, such an event was “a real celebration”. Selective and exhaustive listening operations were carried out near this fair. Being able to access the call on Webex was likely a “fluke as part of a broadly diversified approach,” Pistorius said, 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 sparked an exchange of accusations between Moscow and Berlin in recent days. Germany accuses Russia of waging an “information war”, something Pistorius insisted on again this Tuesday. “We will not let this hybrid attack by 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 parties, between those who are for or against supporting less or more of Ukraine. “All this is a wicked game that Putin is playing here and we must not fall into it,” the Social Democrat politician said.

Likewise, the minister reported that he had several conversations with German partners in which they 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 episode of this type in the last 20 years. “So from this point of view there would be no espionage if espionage was not possible for any reason,” he concluded.

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