The leader of Germany's conservative opposition, Friedrich Merz, says NATO intervention in Ukraine would become a possibility were Russia to carry out targeted attacks on nuclear power plants.
"There may be a situation in which NATO then also has to make decisions to stop Putin," Merz, the head of Germany's CDU-CSU opposition bloc, told German radio station NDR Info on Friday, though he stressed that such an intervention was still a long way down the road.
Merz said that if nuclear power plants were attacked, "if possibly even the reactor blocks were to be hit, then we would be directly threatened by the effects of this war," and in that case, NATO would need to decide whether it constituted an attack on its territory.
Merz said he assumed EU and NATO were already contemplating such a scenario. "The attacks and the way this war is being waged are taking on forms that force us to think," he added.
