“We have received a request from the Ukrainian side in recent days,” an unnamed spokesperson told the AFP news agency, thereby confirming information that appeared in the German media.
According to the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz discussed these robots earlier in May.
The Taurus robots (also known as KEPD 350) have been developed in a collaboration between Swedish Saab Bofors Dynamics and German MBDA. These are robots that are fired at targets on the ground from aircraft. They are five meters long, weigh 1.4 tons and, according to Saab, have a range of at least 50 miles.
Sweden’s military does not use Taurus robots. They are found today in the militaries of Germany, Spain and South Korea. The German Bundeswehr ordered 600 ten years ago.
Ukraine is seeking more support ahead of the expected counter-offensive against Russian-occupied land. However, several allies, such as the United States, have been very hesitant to give the country weapons that could hypothetically reach far into Russia.
Britain announced the other week that the country will send long-range robots of the Storm Shadow model to Ukraine. France announced shortly after that it too will send some kind of new robots, but President Emmanuel Macron emphasized that it does not want to send weapons that can reach into Russia.