KYIV, December 13 ------ Friedrich Merz, frontrunner in the race to become Germany's next chancellor, used an election-time visit to Kyiv to condemn his country's policy on arming Ukraine as akin to making the country fight with one arm tied behind its back. Merz, leader of the opposition conservatives, is a critic of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's refusal to follow Britain, France and the United States in sending Kyiv longer-range weapons capable of striking deep inside Russian territory.
Merz's center-right party alliance is the clear favorite to unseat the Social Democrat, Scholz, in Germany's Feb. 23 vote, enjoying a lead of more than 10 percentage points in most polls. "We want your army to be capable of hitting military bases in Russia. Not the civilian population, not infrastructure, but the military targets from which your country is being attacked," he told President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Scholz has resisted Zelensky's requests for Germany's Taurus cruise missile, whose range and power he said would bring an unacceptable risk of escalation and might be construed as tantamount to Germany joining the war. Military experts believe the Taurus, with its bunker-busting warhead, could be instrumental in destroying targets like the Kersh bridge that links Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, with Russia's mainland.
Source: reuters.com
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