German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Sunday described the eavesdropping part of an “information war” waged by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It’s a hybrid disinformation attack — it’s about division, it’s about undermining our unity,” Pistorius said here on Sunday.

“We must not fall for Putin’s tricks,” he said, adding that Germany will react prudently “but no less decisively” to the leak.

A spokesperson for the German Defense Ministry said Sunday the military’s counterintelligence service would review whether communications were secure enough for such a sensitive conversation, which took place in February.

Audio of the call was first posted Friday on Telegram by Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT. According to German media reports, the officers used the U.S. communications platform Webex.

“Germany is preparing for war with Russia,” the deputy head of Russia’s Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, said Sunday, also on Telegram. “Attempts to present the conversation … as a game of rockets and tanks are a malicious lie.”

The debate over Ukraine aid comes as a $60 billion U.S. assistance package is stalled in Congress, causing weapons and ammunition shortages on the front lines. But Scholz has long rejected calls, including from German politicians, to send Taurus missiles to the Ukrainian battlefield.

Last week, Scholz made clear that Germany wouldn’t be able to control what the missiles, which have a range of about 300 miles, would target, calling the systems “a very far-reaching weapon,” the Associated Press reported.

“What is being done in the way of target control and accompanying target control on the part of the British and the French can’t be done in Germany. Everyone who has dealt with this system knows that,” he said.

The remarks prompted a backlash from British lawmakers. Britain and France have sent long-range Storm Shadow and Scalp missiles to Ukraine.

Scholz’s suggestion that British and French personnel are operating cruise missiles delivered to Ukraine is “wrong, irresponsible and a slap in the face to allies,” Alicia Kearns, chair of the U.K. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said in response.

But in the purported phone call, the German officials refer to Britain as having “a few people on the ground” in Ukraine as part of the deployment of their Storm Shadow missiles.

The officers said the rapid delivery and deployment of Taurus missiles would only be possible with help from German troops. Germany could train Ukrainian forces to use the missiles, they said, but that would take months.

They also discussed whether the missiles could hit a key bridge over the Kerch strait, which links Russia to the Crimean Peninsula, a territory it illegally annexed from Ukraine.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a news conference Saturday that the call revealed the “cunning plans” of the German military. “This is a blatant self-exposure,” he said, Reuters reported.

Morgunov reported from Kyiv.