(Reuters) – A senior Ukrainian lawmaker said on Monday that key parliamentary factions in Germany had “reached a consensus” to supply Ukraine with Taurus cruise missiles with a range of 500 km (310 miles) but that an official decision was yet to come.
Germany’s defence minister said last week Berlin does not plan to supply the missiles for now and that the weapons are not the most urgent priority. A ministry spokesperson told Reuters on Monday that Berlin’s position had not changed.
However Yehor Chernev, a lawmaker who heads Ukraine’s delegation at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, said: “My friends in the Bundestag just told me that key parliamentary factions have reached consensus regarding the transfer to Ukraine of long-range Taurus missiles.”
“We’ve worked for a long time with German parliamentarians to form a support group and now finally the ice has broken. We await an official decision,” he wrote on Facebook.
Ukraine is hoping to secure long-range weapons from the West to strike back at Russia which has used an array of missiles fired from hundreds of kilometres away to wreak damage on its infrastructure.
(Reporting by Tom Balmforth and Sabine Siebold; Editing by Gareth Jones)
