German defence minister: not considering sending Taurus missiles to Ukraine

BERLIN (Reuters) -German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said on Thursday that Germany is not considering delivering Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine despite Kyiv's repeated requests.
Although Germany is one of Ukraine's main military backers, Berlin has never supplied Taurus missiles, which have a range in excess of 300 miles (480 km).
Answering a journalist's question during his fifth visit to Kyiv since the start of the war, Pistorius said, "Since you asked me whether we are considering this, my answer is no."
In the same news conference, the minister said his country's military support for Ukraine had reached 7 billion euros ($8.12 billion) this year and a further 1.9 billion euros were pending parliamentary approval.
($1 = 0.8621 euros)
(Writing by Friederike HeineEditing by Madeline Chambers)

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Satellite imagery shows that there are above-ground buildings still standing, belying Trump's claims of complete destruction, but many of the targets are underground. It's possible these were dealt a severe blow, and it's possible they weren't. Either scenario creates pathways to escalation. If the damage is indeed relatively limited, and one round of American bombs was not able to shatter the heavily reinforced concrete Iran uses to protect its underground assets, the Trump administration will face two bad choices. It can either let a clearly furious Iran retain operational nuclear facilities, raising the risk that they dash for a nuclear weapon, or it can keep bombing until the attacks have done sufficient damage to prevent Iran from getting a weapon in the immediate future. That commits the United States to, at minimum, an indefinite bombing campaign inside Iran. But even if this attack did do real damage, that leaves the question of the program's long-term future. 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That leaves the other form of 'finishing the job': a full-on war of regime change. My colleague Josh Keating has argued, convincingly, that Israel wants such an outcome. And some of Trump's allies, including Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, have openly called for it. 'Wouldn't the world be better off if the ayatollahs went away and were replaced by something better?' Graham asked, rhetorically, in a Fox News interview last Monday. 'It's time to close the chapter on the Ayatollah and his henchmen. Let's close it soon.' Such a dire outcome seems, at present, very distant. But the further Trump continues down a hawkish path on Iran, the more thinkable it will become. Escalation pathway two: a US-Iran cycle of violence There's a military truism that, in war, 'the enemy gets a vote.' It could be that Iran's actions force American escalation even if the Trump administration doesn't want to go any further than it has right now. So far, Iran's military response to both US and Israeli attacks has been underwhelming. Tehran is clearly hobbled by the damage Israel did to its proxy militias, Hezbollah and Hamas, and its ballistic missiles are not capable of threatening the Israeli homeland in the way that many fear. But there are two things Iran hasn't tried that are, after American intervention, more likely to be on the table. The first is an attack on US servicemembers stationed in the Middle East, of which there are somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 at present. Of particular note are the US forces currently stationed in Iraq and Syria. Iraq is home to several Iranian-aligned militias that could potentially be ordered to directly attack American troops in the country or across the border in Syria. The second is an attack on international shipping lanes. The most dangerous scenario involves an attempt to use missiles and naval assets to close the Strait of Hormuz, a Persian Gulf passage used by roughly 20 percent of global oil shipping by volume. If Iran either kills significant numbers of American troops or attempts to do major damage to the global economy, there will surely be American retaliation. In his Saturday speech, Trump promised that if Iran retaliates, 'future [American] attacks will be far greater and a lot easier.' An effort to detonate the global oil market would, without a doubt, necessitate such a response: The US cannot allow Iran to hold its economy hostage. We do not, to be clear, know whether Iran is willing to take such risks, or even if it can. Israeli attacks have devastated its military capabilities, including ballistic missile launchers that allow it to hit targets well beyond its borders. But a 'cycle of violence' is a very common way that violence escalates: One side attacks, the other side retaliates, prompting another attack, and on up the chain. Once they start, such cycles can be difficult to prevent from spiraling out of control. Escalation pathway three: the Iraq analogy, or things fall apart I want to be clear that escalation here isn't a given. It is possible that the US and its Israeli partners remain satisfied with one American bombing run, and that the Iranians are too scared or weak to engage in any major response. But those are a whole lot of 'ifs.' And we have no way of knowing, at present, whether we're heading to a best- or worst-case scenario (or one of several possibilities in the middle). Key decision points, like whether Trump orders another round of US raids on Fordow or Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, will determine which pathways we go down — and it's hard to know which choices the key actors in Washington, Tehran, and Jerusalem will make. I keep thinking about the 2003 Iraq war in part for obvious reasons: the US attacking a Middle Eastern dictatorship based on flimsy intelligence claims about weapons of mass destruction. But the other parallel, perhaps a deeper one, is that the architects of the Iraq War had little-to-no understanding of the second-order consequences of their choices. There was so much they didn't know, both about Iraq as a country and the likely consequences of regime change more broadly, that they failed to grasp just how much of a quagmire the war might become until it had already sucked in the United States. It's over 20 years later, and boots are still on the ground — drawn in by events, like the creation of ISIS, that were direct results of the initial decision to invade. Attacking Iran, even with the more 'modest' aim of destroying its nuclear program, carries similar risks. The attack carries so many potential consequences, involving so many different countries and constituencies, that it's hard to even begin to try to account for all the potential risks that might cause further US escalation. There are likely consequences taking shape, at this moment, that we can't even begin to conceive of. The nature of the Trump administration gives me little hope that they've properly gamed this out. The president himself is a compulsive liar and foreign policy ignoramus. The secretary of defense has run his department into the ground. The secretary of state, who is also the national security adviser, has more jobs than anyone could reasonably be expected to perform competently at once. It is, in short, far less competent on paper than the Bush administration was prior to the Iraq invasion — and look how that went. It's possible, despite all of this, that the Trump administration has adequately gamed out their choices here — preparing for all reasonably foreseeable contingencies and capable of acting swiftly in the (inevitable) event that some response catches the world by surprise. But if it didn't, then things could go badly and tragically wrong.