Germany accuses Russia of twisting minister’s wartime comments for ‘propaganda’
Russia has distorted the German Foreign Minister’s comments on the war in Ukraine for propaganda purposes, a German Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Friday, underlining Berlin’s position that NATO should not become a party to the conflict.
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock annoyed Moscow with comments at an event in Strasbourg on Tuesday when, speaking in English, she said that “we are waging a war against Russia, not each against others”. She spoke the day before the German government announced it was arming Ukraine with advanced Leopard tanks, putting aside earlier reservations about whether such a move could spur Moscow to escalate the war.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, in a message on her Telegram channel quoted by state news agency TASS on Wednesday, seized on Baerbock’s comments as evidence that the West was conducting a war. “premeditated war against Russia”. While Baerbock has often seemed more hawkish than other German cabinet members on support for Ukraine, Berlin has repeatedly stressed that he wants to avoid the NATO alliance becoming a party to the conflict. This concern was partly the reason for Germany’s delay in agreeing to send the Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
“Russian propaganda continually takes statements, phrases, positions, positions from the government, from our partners and uses them to serve its purposes,” the German Foreign Ministry spokesman said. Kyiv and its Western allies say Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24 last year, amounts to an unprovoked war of aggression aimed at seizing territory. Moscow says the West is using Ukraine to weaken Russia’s own security.
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