Failure to deliver weapons
Merz: Scholz misled the public
07/27/2022, 06:16 am
In an exchange of rings, German weapons are to go to Poland, which had previously supplied Ukraine with Soviet-era tanks. The plan doesn’t quite work out, opposition leader Merz blames Chancellor Scholz. The CDU leader wants to calm things down in Warsaw himself.
Before his trip to Poland, CDU leader Friedrich Merz accused Chancellor Olaf Scholz of serious failure to deliver weapons to Ukraine. “The German public and parliament are being deceived. And the federal government is not doing what the Bundestag decided: namely to supply heavy weapons,” Merz told the newspapers of the Funke media group. “The attacks on Odessa last week could possibly have been prevented with the missile defense systems that Olaf Scholz promised to deliver.”
“His announcements about military support for Ukraine do not stand up to scrutiny,” said the CDU chairman and Union faction leader. The Union has therefore lost “all confidence” in the commitments of the federal government. “We have to have a public debate about how trustworthy our government is in our own country, but also and especially in Central and Eastern Europe.”
Proposals are now coming from the ranks of the FDP and the Greens to “supply Ukraine directly with tanks because the exchange of rings announced by Scholz with other countries has become a dead end,” Merz continued. “That’s also a daily sign of distrust in your own chancellor.”
Merz travels to Poland on Wednesday, where a meeting with Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki is planned. According to the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Merz wants to address, among other things, the problems with the tank ring exchange with Poland. In addition, the CDU leader wants to visit the base of the multinational EFP Battlegroup (Enhanced Forward Presence) on NATO’s eastern flank in Rukla, Lithuania, which is run by the Bundeswehr. Merz had already traveled to Ukraine in early May and was received in Kyiv by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.