Germany taught the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation to fight for invasion of Crimea: Rheinmetall built a center in the Volga region - the media

One of these projects was the center of combat training in the village of Mulino of the Nizhny Novgorod region of the Russian Federation. The German government insisted on the conclusion of an agreement with Russia by Rheinmetall, which did not play such a significant role in the defense business as it is today. Representatives of the company itself are now said about the pressure from government officials.

According to journalists, the Russian military delegation signed a contract with the RheinMetall group in June 2011. The cost of the first "Russian Army Training Center" was 135 million euros. The then CEO of Rheinmetall Claus Eberhardt explained the newspaper "Rheinische Post" that the company "celebrated a big contract" because it was a "world leader" in the field and wanted to "prove it in Russia".

The Russian Defense Ministry Service was also to create a joint venture for Russian military equipment repair and modernization of Russian military equipment. Presrealization stated that by 2014, Mulino had to build a "state -of -the -art" training base, capable of teaching up to 30,000 soldiers a year.

Journalists say that during the year after the contract signing the Bundeswehr and Technology, Rheinmetall has repeatedly visited the Russian Mulino, and Russian experts and servicemen in their turn often went to the Bundesver and Rheinmetall plants. The German Ministry of Defense planned to constantly send the military to the Mulino, and the first soldiers arrived in the Russian village to view the apartments.

In February 2013, the Russian media reported on the planned exercises of "servicemen of motorized and armored vehicles of the Western military district" together with "German colleagues", the purpose of which was to "identify" and "destroy" armed gangs. In the German Ministry of Defense, it was extinguished that such "combat terminology" was not agreed, and because of political harm to the German government, maneuvers were postponed to 2014.

The cooperation of Russia and Germany stopped when Russian President Vladimir Putin occupied Ukrainian Crimea in March 2014. RheinMetall today is trying to distance themselves as possible from the episode of cooperation with the Russians in its history and insist that the agreement has been concluded exclusively under political pressure. At the same time, the combat training center in the Russian Mulino was put into operation without the support of Rheinmetall.

In September 2021, before a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russians conducted one of the last major operational and strategic exercises "West-2021" with the participation of 200,000 soldiers from the Russian Federation and Belarus. "The war is now underway. And German servicemen, oddly enough, taught the Russians how to wage the war more effectively," the authors of the material said.