Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, Susanna Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today, we would like to talk about Ukraine, arms deliveries and the underlying shifting politics behind Western support of Ukraine.

In Germany right now, there is a big debate about whether the government should or should not send the Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine.

The reports in the German press this morning have been that Olaf Schultz personally is now intervened to stop the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles.

Annalena Berbock, the foreign minister, is in favor,

though she has been treading cautiously diplomatically on her recent visit to Ukraine,

not making any promises that would put pressure on the government.

This is clearly an issue of contention inside the government.

It's clearly a contention in the German political debate at large.

The CDU is accusing Schultz of playing the old game of trying to reconnect with Russia

for Germany to pretend it is supporting Ukraine, but it isn't the, we recall the old expression

of Schultz thing, doing one thing and saying another thing is back on the agenda.

We also recall the situation we had over the leopard tanks when Schultz also put is back on the agenda. We also recall the situation we had

over the leopard tanks when Schultz also put the foot on the break and only relented after

he's secured to deal with the Americans that they too were delivering tanks. This time is not

so easy. Jack, what is your assessment of the situation? Do you think this is from a Ukrainian

perspective a real problem or is this something that we will get through?

So, I mean, I think the first thing about the Taurus missile is that there are obviously a number of different factors which go into ensuring that somebody is or isn't successful in a military conflict.

And you can't just pin it down to kind of the raw capability somebody has alone.

But these longer range missile systems like the Taurus are clearly quite useful.

I mean, we saw a demonstration of that this week when storm shadow missiles of the type

that the British and the French have provided to Ukraine have, they basically damaged a Russian

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