Merz then said he wanted to impose an ultimatum on the Russian president, giving him 24 hours to refrain from striking civilian targets in Ukraine. The leader of the center-right Christian Democratic party also took the opportunity to summon Scholz to declare to the European Council this Thursday that “we no longer accept that Russian President Vladimir Putin destroys civilian infrastructure, hospitals, kindergartens, indiscriminately“.
In the event of non-compliance with this measure, his Ukrainian opponent Volodymyr Zelensky would then be authorized to attack territories located in deep Russia. “This cannot continue like this, and if Putin does not accept it, then we must move on to the next step“, he declared. To support his argument, Merz also brandished the threat of the delivery of Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine, which had until now been the subject of strong reluctance on the part of the current German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, for “destroy the supply lines that this regime uses to damage and bomb the civilian population in Ukraine.“
“We call them the Buryat battalion”: In Russia, the “participation of a second state in the war against Ukraine” at the heart of the accusations
