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David Solomon was under siege from partners critical of his leadership; the firm launched a probe to identify leakers

David Solomon was fed up with his critics inside Goldman Sachs GS 0.05%increase; green up pointing triangle. The time had come to crack down.

It was bad enough that Goldman partners were criticizing the chief executive’s leadership and bad-mouthing the storied bank’s costly expansion of consumer lending. What rankled Solomon even more was the suspicion that some of the naysayers were leaking details to reporters. Goldman launched a probe to figure out who was talking, according to people familiar with the probe.

Solomon was going through a brutal stretch in 2022 and 2023. The consumer lending expansion that he had spearheaded was generating billions of dollars in losses. It was hurting Goldman’s stock, moneymaking partners were leaving and Solomon had taken flak for his attention-grabbing side gig DJing.

Solomon told Goldman’s board that he was going to take action, pushing out troublemakers who he said were undermining him with their leaks, people familiar with the matter said. The board told Solomon he had their support. By last year, longtime executives who had openly criticized his strategy were gone. The departures sent a message inside Goldman: No one is safe if they go up against the CEO.

These days, things are going a whole lot smoother for Solomon. The bank is exiting consumer lending and refocusing on its core businesses of advising giant companies and wealthy individuals. Solomon gave up the prominent DJ gigs. Profits have been rising steadily. In February, Goldman’s stock hit a record high.

David Solomon DJing at a nightclub.

Solomon’s hobby of DJing drew criticism within the firm. A performance at a nightclub in Brooklyn in 2018. Photo: trevor hunnicutt/Reuters

And Solomon, 63 years old, has cemented control for the foreseeable future. This year, he got a 26% raise and an $80 million bonus to stay for five more years.

This account of Solomon’s comeback is based on conversations with current and former Goldman partners and executives, many of whom interacted directly with Solomon over the period.

The board and his allies inside Goldman give Solomon credit for refocusing the firm and boosting its financial results. Goldman’s revenue and profit were both up since the beginning of 2024, and its stock has risen 55%.

Goldman spokesman Tony Fratto said the firm has “met or exceeded” most of the goals it had set in a 2020 strategic plan for growth and improving returns.

But not all the internal whispers about Solomon’s leadership have gone away. Several senior partners told The Wall Street Journal that Solomon has benefited from a broader stock market surge and economic conditions that have been favorable for trading and dealmaking, and Goldman might have done even better were it not for the consumer-lending fiasco.

Goldman’s spokesman responded that the bank’s stock has outperformed its peers. Goldman’s stock is up 233% over the past five years. Its archrival Morgan Stanley is up 214%, and JPMorgan Chase is up 191%.

Solomon joined Goldman as a partner in 1999. In 2018, after running its powerful investment banking unit and then serving as a chief operating officer and president, he became CEO, Goldman’s third since it went public in 1999.

He moved quickly to overhaul a firm that had operated for decades as a loosely run partnership. Many Goldman partners consider their opinions about the firm’s direction to be as important as the CEO’s. Solomon was soon butting heads with some of them.

During his first four years in charge, he initiated several reorganizations. He separated wealth management from asset management in 2020, only to bring them back together again in 2022.

The frequent structural changes contributed to an exodus of partners. In asset management, nine of the 11 partners named as leaders in early 2022 are gone. “When you restructure an entire division, leadership changes are sometimes inevitable,” the firm’s spokesman said.

At times, when partners came to Solomon’s office to tell him they were leaving, the CEO would yell at them.

Consumer push

Few decisions stirred as much internal controversy as his push to expand the consumer-lending business. The effort to court ordinary consumers had begun under Solomon’s predecessor, Lloyd Blankfein.

The high-yield savings accounts offered by Goldman’s consumer arm—called Marcus after the firm’s founder—had been a success, and Solomon wanted to pitch more products to consumers. He cited Chime, a financial technology company that provides mobile banking services mainly to customers of modest means, as a model of what he wanted Goldman to achieve.

The consumer expansion proved costly. Solomon pushed forward with a roughly $2 billion acquisition of specialty lender GreenSky in 2021, overruling deputies who had counseled against the deal when it first came up a few years earlier. (In 2023, Goldman agreed to sell the company at a loss.)

Investment banking had a record year in 2021, overshadowing the consumer losses, and Goldman’s bankers reaped big bonuses. Then investment banking slowed, and pay declined. Employees from vice presidents to senior partners began laying the blame on the consumer experiment.

Every dollar lost investing in consumers, the internal critics argued, was a dollar the bank didn’t spend on its core businesses or the compensation for bankers and traders. Solomon told partners who questioned the consumer endeavor that they had no vision.

As the noise intensified, Solomon told high-ranking colleagues he was having difficulty knowing whom to trust. At one management committee meeting, he said he couldn’t talk openly and honestly with the group when media reports about him or the firm were appearing shortly after their meetings.

At a dinner with roughly a dozen partners, Ed Emerson, a top trader, blasted the consumer business. Emerson said he thought Solomon should be fired and Goldman President John Waldron should be made CEO. Word got back to Solomon about what Emerson said.

Longtime partner Jim Esposito, co-head of the global banking and markets division, was another critic of the consumer strategy. Esposito said in group meetings and in one-on-ones with Solomon that the firm was making mistakes expanding the business, and that he didn’t agree with Solomon’s all-in approach on consumers.

Relations between Esposito and Solomon, who had worked together closely for years, turned testy at times. Esposito wrote a memo for Solomon offering strategic recommendations, including why the consumer business wasn’t right for Goldman. He met with Solomon to go through it. The CEO strongly disagreed with him.

Esposito told a colleague that during another meeting, Solomon told Esposito that Disney chief Bob Iger had given him some advice: At some point the CEO has to pick the strategic direction himself, and the leadership team has to be on board.

In 2022, as the bank’s profit slumped, Waldron, Goldman’s president, led a review of the entire consumer operation. That same year, the firm’s consumer-lending operations came under scrutiny from the Federal Reserve and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

By that fall, the firm had concluded consumer lending needed to shrink, and began its exit.

Cracking down

The dismal earnings continued in 2023, extending a run of profit declines that would hit eight quarters in a row that year.

The board had launched a review about what had gone wrong with the consumer business and who should be held responsible. Solomon’s role in expanding the business was part of the review.

The company also launched a widespread probe to try to determine whether any of its executives, including senior partners such as Esposito, were talking to reporters.

In late 2023, Esposito and Solomon discussed the strategic direction of the firm and whether Esposito was on track to become either president or CEO. Esposito didn’t like the feedback he got. A few weeks later, Goldman announced to employees that Esposito was leaving. In the memo, Solomon praised Esposito for his integrity.

In his own farewell email, Esposito said: “Lately, I’ve been consumed by a feeling of merely going through the motions which isn’t in my DNA nor what makes this place special.”

By that time, Goldman also had announced the departure of Emerson, the partner who had criticized Solomon at a company dinner.

Other senior partners also left around this time, including some who were viewed as noisemakers.

A turning point for Solomon came in September 2023 when Adebayo Ogunlesi, then the board’s lead director, told analyst Mike Mayo that the board fully supported Solomon.

Solomon began telling his deputies he intended to stay around for as many as five more years. It surprised some executives because when Solomon took the CEO job, he had said he would leave sooner. Executives close to Solomon said he wanted to rebuild his image and not go out with the consumer failure being his legacy. He also wants to make more money. Goldman’s spokesman said Solomon remains at the firm because he loves the job.

He began traveling the world to meet in small groups with nearly all of the more than 400 Goldman partners. He told them the firm was his priority, and that they shouldn’t pay attention to stories about him.

He has overseen several big changes to the firm’s core businesses, including increasing its lending to institutions and wealthy individuals, and reworking the way the firm runs its asset-management business.

Goldman’s core businesses of investment banking, trading, and asset and wealth management performed well last year. After the November election, the bank’s stock, like shares of many other financial institutions, jumped on anticipation that dealmaking and capital markets activity would roar back.

Since at least 2023, Solomon and Waldron wanted to add younger blood to the bank’s management committee, but the process dragged out, in part because they disagreed about some of the people who should be added. They created operating committees for investment banking and markets and assigned roughly a dozen people to each of them.

Waldron has long wanted to be CEO himself. Since Solomon wasn’t ready to pass the torch, Waldron would have to figure out what he wanted to do, Solomon told a top deputy.

Waldron began meeting with potential new employers. Senior executives at Goldman said he wasn’t hiding it. Private-equity giant Apollo Global Management approached Waldron to join the firm, the Journal reported late last year.

In December, Waldron told Solomon he was leaving for Apollo.

You can’t do this to me, replied Solomon.

The CEO went to Goldman’s board and made the case that the firm couldn’t lose Waldron, even if Solomon intended to stay.

The board offered both of them $80 million retention bonuses to stay five more years, and Waldron was offered a board seat. Waldron decided to stay.

Solomon got a raise to $39 million. The board cited Solomon’s role in narrowing the firm’s focus on Goldman’s core businesses, and the 48% increase in the bank’s stock price in 2024.

The chatter inside Goldman these days is no longer how long Solomon can last, but when he’ll decide to hand over the top job to Waldron.

In quest to make NATO more lethal, the Pentagon turns to the high north and the Baltics

Key Points

• U.S. military is doubling down in Northern Europe amid concerns about NATO’s future and Russia’s aggression.
• NATO allies are conducting joint military exercises in the Nordic and Baltic regions to deter Russia and improve integration.
• Gotland, a Swedish island, is a strategic location for NATO. It is undergoing rearmament to serve as a hub for logistics and defense.

The dummy munitions splashed into the Baltic Sea, yet they sent a message to Russia: Even as President Trump has thrown NATO into a historic crisis by questioning its efficacy, in Northern Europe, the U.S. military is doubling down.

The Trump administration wants the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to get more “lethal.” A testing ground is Europe’s north, where NATO faces Russia on two sides.

Some European officials worry that America’s commitment to the trans-Atlantic alliance is waning, given Trump’s criticism of it and his stated desire to reduce military engagement abroad, but U.S. military commanders say their posture remains firm.

“From a U.S. Army perspective, my orders haven’t changed,” said Brig. Gen. Andrew Saslav, deputy chief of staff for operations for U.S. Army Europe and Africa. While the question of future U.S. engagement is “on my mind,” he said, “I have been doing this too long to get hyperfocused on political winds and messaging that isn’t orders.”

The high north and the Baltics have been thrust into the center of U.S. war planning, as their access to shipping routes, territory and energy reserves will be crucial to the West in a new era of geopolitical conflict. The region is hawkish on Russia and is driving European efforts to rearm and boost defense budgets, including support for Ukraine’s armed forces.

During a three-week exercise, U.S. and U.K. forces joined Nordic and Baltic troops to practice potential war scenarios including live-fire drills, blood resupplies by drone and airborne jumps above the Arctic circle in Norway.

The goal was twofold: deter Russian aggression and more firmly integrate allies in this strategic corner of Europe, including new NATO members Finland and Sweden.

“Now that Finland and Sweden have become members of NATO, we have a continuous piece of NATO territory north of the Arctic Circle,” said Kristian Atland, senior research fellow with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, which advises Norway’s armed forces. “The Nordic NATO enlargement has also made it easier for NATO to transfer reinforcements to the Baltic states in the event of a military crisis or conflict in that region.”

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Nordic countries have ramped up military spending. Finland shares an 800-mile border with Russia. Norway’s border with Russia is close to the Kola Peninsula, home to Moscow’s main submarine force, the Northern Fleet. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have long warned of Russia’s militaristic ambitions and provide sophisticated intelligence about their larger neighbor.

Still, officials here say deepening relations between the region and Washington shouldn’t deflect from NATO cohesion.

“It’s not about creating a club inside the club, it’s about making NATO stronger,” said Carl-Johan Edström, Swedish chief of defense staff. “But parallel to that, you can do some bilateral or multilateral cooperation or operations. That is only strengthening the collective defense.”

Gotland is among the most strategic locations in Northern Europe, allowing the deployment of sensors and long-range weapons systems to dominate air and sea operations in the Baltic region. Former Swedish defense chief Micael Bydén last year said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “both eyes” on Gotland.

“As Russia’s maritime strategic locations in the Baltic Sea are very weak, any conflict will include Russia immediately seeking to occupy key port areas in the Baltics, Finland and Poland,” said Stefan Lundqvist, Sweden chair to the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies in Alaska. “The key military strategic location of Gotland will most likely be the scene of hostile action in the opening stage of conflict,” he said.

After being demilitarized for years, Gotland is at the heart of Swedish rearmament. In war, the island can serve as a hub for NATO logistics and control of sea line communications, and to help build up offensive capabilities for deep strikes on enemy soil.

The projected wartime strength on the island is about 4,500 troops, and hundreds of conscripts arrive each year. They are an awkward fit among the residents, many of whom relocated here in recent years, attracted by Gotland’s natural serenity and medieval cobblestoned streets, not expecting shooting ranges in their backyard.

To simulate the defense of Gotland, a U.K. pathfinder platoon last week carried out reconnaissance. Days later, 110 U.K. paratroopers dropped 1,000 feet from two A400M transport aircraft onto an open field before trekking through the night through woods to secure an aircraft-landing zone.

Meanwhile, around midnight, a unit of U.S. Marines arrived nearby with a mobile rocket system, which can be deployed quickly in the event of war. Hours earlier, the Marines had been in Norway. After launching the dummy munitions—poles made of concrete—the Marines flew the system to Finland for a similar demonstration.

The M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, has altered the course of the war in Ukraine since the U.S. provided it in mid-2022. The system fires Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System rockets, or GMLRS, with a range of about 45 miles, and longer-range Army Tactical Missile System known as ATACMS, which can shoot up to 186 miles.

Ukraine has used the system to hit Russian logistics, tanks, bridges, infantry groups and ammunition depots. Now, the Trump administration’s suspension of weapons deliveries to Ukraine threatens to undermine the gains.

One of the main tasks facing NATO members is to ensure that their respective military systems function smoothly together. The American-led rocket launch on Gotland relied on complex, multinational communication involving sensors, command-and-control and airfields in several countries. In Lithuania, NATO forces simulated evacuations and treatment of casualties through three types of medical and evacuation systems, each of which belonged to different nations.

The pace of technological invention, dominated by private companies rather than governments, has complicated such coordination.

“Our challenge right now is, how do we keep the alliance tied together with this rapid change?” Saslav said.

French charities turn to UK philanthropists as the state retreats at home

‘We are where the US was 100 years ago and where the UK was 50 years ago,’ says one fundraiser in France

On a dark, cutting-cold night in January, a well-heeled crowd was listening to a piano recital at the Institut Français in London’s South Kensington. Alexandre Tharaud started with a lilting Debussy Prélude before giving Ravel’s “Une barque sur l’océan” its full measure of listing and swaying. But the audience — wealthy French people resident in the city — were not principally here for the programme of impressionist music.

Afterwards, they repaired to the Institut’s elegant double-height library for speeches and presentations about philanthropy. The French ambassador, Hélène Duchêne, switching between host and native language, talked of the UK as a country “where the philanthropy tradition is most highly developed”. She called Gift Aid, which allows charities to claim 25 per cent extra on donations, “un instrument formidable”.

Axelle Davezac, director-general of the Fondation de France, followed Duchêne. The Fondation is a French government agency set up by Charles de Gaulle in 1969 to encourage private philanthropy. It is also a national umbrella organisation, co-ordinating financial support for everything from social exclusion and violin virtuosi to rebuilding Notre-Dame cathedral and the hurricane-struck French overseas territory of Mayotte.

The event in South Kensington was to launch the Fondation’s UK chapter, the start of a search for donors based in the country to support French charities. Davezac spoke about “a vision of mutual enrichment and shared progress” for the two countries, which had a “tumultuous” yet “rich and radiant” history.

The language of the evening was about drawing together two countries, divided by Brexit and a deeper history, with good works and generous spirits. Underlying it, though, was a recognition that as the French state, facing a severe budget deficit, retrenches, France needs to learn to love philanthropy, with all the financial and cultural adjustments that requires. To do this, its charities are coming to the UK, to find both money and method.

‘The UK is one of the biggest and most generous countries in Europe. But in France, it was not the case,” says Davezac shortly before the performance when she talks to the Financial Times. She has the figures to prove the disparity: despite similar population sizes and GDPs, the UK public, including wealthy individuals, gave £21.9bn to charity in 2023, the French €5.4bn (£4.5bn) in 2022.

With its large French-origin population, the UK is a natural spot for Davezac, philanthropic largesse aside. Nearly 276,000 French nationals applied for the country’s EU Settlement Scheme between August 2018 and September 2024, according to Home Office data.

The francophone community is not the only reason for Davezac to open a new branch in the UK: the French government, which ran a 5.8 per cent deficit in 2024, is aiming for €50bn of spending cuts and tax hikes, including reductions for social, educational and charitable organisations. Local councils, which tend to be core supporters of these bodies, have lost €2.2bn in funding; the culture ministry, €150mn. The situation is “not so good”, says Davezac.

London-based philanthropist Jean-Baptiste Wautier, who was at the launch, says France’s “nanny state” is one of the most extensive among developed countries, “so people have always viewed charity as being the job of the state”, where you pay high taxes and the state, in return, takes care of you.

He says even the legal framework for philanthropy is lacking: France has associations, but these are for “any lawful activity except for the ‘sharing of profits’”, according to the Council on Foundations, rather than specifically for charitable ends, and so are not comparable to UK charities. “The charity sector is close to nonexistent and therefore big donors are not very numerous,” says Wautier.

He adds that France’s culture, in part deriving from religious-cultural strictures on the evils of wealth — “it’s probably poorly digested Catholicism” — means overt dealing with money has negative connotations. Therefore, he says, “being seen as giving large amounts of money to a good cause, which would be seen as socially great in the UK or US, is seen poorly, at best neutral, in France”.

That was proved true even with the rare recent example of large-scale philanthropy in France, the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, severely damaged by fire six years ago. Within a week, France’s richest families had pledged more than half a billion euros: €200mn from the Arnaults and LVMH, the same from the Bettencourts and L’Oréal, €100mn from the Pinaults and Artémis. It was not long before an outcry: unions and leftwing politicians complained that these companies had found money for Notre-Dame, but not their workers, and that they would be eligible for tax deductions on their donations. At least two families renounced them.

After Duchêne and Davezac’s speeches, there was a presentation to the audience from Institut Imagine, a Paris-based centre for care, education and research into genetic diseases. The Institut Imagine team were hoping to meet new donors and, speaking after the event, Professor Bana Jabri, executive director and a specialist in paediatrics and immunology, is full of praise for the Fondation and says the launch offered promising leads.

Jabri says the Institut is focused on “valorisation”: turning ideas into patents and then into start-ups and industrial products and technologies. Just as one never focuses solely on the organ affected by a disease but looks at the entire body, says Jabri, Institut Imagine generates progress by having all its groups and stages under one roof.

To support its €80.3mn budget in 2023, Institut Imagine received €34.5mn from public funders and raised €7.2mn from private donors; it aims to sustainably increase that in the next few years to €10mn. It has been unusual for France in its approach to philanthropy, hosting charitable galas featuring art auctions and running a €40mn fundraising campaign, which has required looking across the Channel (and the Atlantic): it is “inspired a lot by the Anglo-Saxon system”, says Jabri.

“We are where the US was 100 years ago and where the UK was 50 years ago,” adds Laurent Mellier, Institut Imagine’s development and international philanthropy director.

Those US/UK-led innovations include allying with private equity. The Raise Group, an asset management firm, announced an initial closing of €25mn in 2023 for its Invest for Childhood fonds de partage (shared fund), which will give 50-80 per cent of its capital gains to Institut Imagine and Espérance Banlieues, a network of independent schools for children in deprived areas.

“Lots of organisations are not very comfortable with this way of raising funds,” says Mellier, but he sounds pleased when he confirms that the fund has now reached its €40mn target.

The battle is about more than cash. Since the state has been so supportive, says Jabri, it is a new thing for individuals to be asked for money: “It’s not in the culture of French charity to invest in a big building and put your name on it. We have to take into account the French mentality and how we go about philanthropy here.”

“We come from a culture where King Louis XIV was making decisions for everybody,” says Mellier. “We are far from those times but we are still functioning the way they did in the past.”

The subject was ostensibly uncontroversial, the perfect thing to attract some France-friendly female philanthropists to a breakfast talk at Colnaghi gallery in St James’s last October. Frédéric Dassas, chief curator in charge of decorative arts at the Louvre, would speak on “Marie Antoinette, Queen of the Arts” while showing slides of ancien régime marvels: a painting, a console, a bedroom at the Petit Trianon. The Fonds de dotation du Louvre (Louvre Endowment Fund) was hoping to meet potential donors.

But about halfway through, the lectured turned lecturers. One grande dame erupted with thoughts on how the queen was portrayed differently in one of the biographies she had read compared with Dassas’s claim. Another, when Dassas said something about how one of Marie Antoinette’s rooms would have been furnished, piped up: “I had a private tour, it was not like that at all.” Dassas said it certainly would have been back in the queen’s day. “But I had a private tour!”

Dassas was impeccably polite, but the Louvre Endowment Fund was learning something UK charities have long known about dealing with the rich when you want to ask them for money: a certain amount of biting your lip is essential. The converse is that there is an Anglo-American openness, indeed flashiness, around giving which France forbears.

The Louvre Endowment Fund, like the Fondation de France, is on the pioneering side of French philanthropy. It was established in 2009, following “Anglo-Saxon models”, says its website, thanks to the €400mn it is receiving over 30 years from licensing its name to a museum in Abu Dhabi. Its portfolio, which stood at €337mn at the end of 2023, has half its money in equities, but also investments in private equity and infrastructure, such as Colombia’s largest hydroelectric plant.

Philippe Gaboriau, the endowment’s executive director, says it has held events in Switzerland, Monaco and the UK. “Each time it’s always the same logic: all these countries are full of French people who have been moving [there] for fiscal or professional reasons. And there are huge communities of French wealthy people in these countries.” The French in London are the bridgehead: next come British francophiles and the broader international rich.

Gaboriau is less convinced than Axelle Davezac of the difference in generosity between the UK and France: “The degree of philanthropy for Americans has no equal in the western world,” he says. “The sphere of philanthropy in the UK is somewhat similar to the one we find in France — not that bad.”

It might not be bad, but it is clearly no longer sufficient for French charities. The UK was the Fondation de France’s second new international arm in the past year, having established an Asian branch based in Hong Kong in July 2024. (In 2000 it launched a friends organisation in charities’ happy hunting-ground, the US.) But the British chapter will be closest to home and comes after years of strained cross-Channel relations because of Brexit. Davezac is explicit that this move is a chance for the UK and France “to reshape our links”.

The philanthropist Wautier sees charity not just as a way of improving UK-France relations, but also as a harbinger of something bigger too: “Europe is sinking and neither France nor the UK on their own can turn their destiny around, and there would be so much in collaborating more.” Alongside defence and migration management, perhaps philanthropy will become one of the ties binding a new Europe.

Chancellor says Berlin has joined the US, UK and France in lifting range restrictions on weapons supplied to Kyiv

Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz has backed Ukrainian military strikes deep into Russian territory, following his earlier commitment to supply Kyiv with German long-range missiles.

Germany, Britain, France and the US have removed all range restrictions for weapons delivered to Ukraine, Merz said on Monday.

Paris, London and Washington have supplied long-range missiles to Kyiv and have already allowed strikes in Russian territory.

But Merz’s stance contrasts with that of his Social Democratic predecessor Olaf Scholz, whom he replaced this month.

The former chancellor repeatedly rejected pleas from Kyiv and its allies to supply the Ukrainian armed forces with German Taurus missiles, which have an intelligent warhead system that can inflict huge damage to structures such as bridges and bunkers. 

While Merz has decided to stop disclosing weapon deliveries since taking office — a stance in line with the “strategic ambiguity” approach of French President Emmanuel Macron — he had previously said he favoured deliveries of Taurus missiles to Kyiv if they were co-ordinated with European allies.

“There is no longer any range restriction on weapons delivered to Ukraine, neither by the British, nor by the French, nor by us, nor by the Americans,” Merz said at a conference in Berlin on Monday.

He added: “This means that Ukraine can now defend itself, for example by attacking military positions in Russia. It couldn’t do that until some time ago, it did do that with very few exceptions. [Ukraine] can do that now. In jargon we call this long range fire.”

The centre-right chancellor made his comments after three days of Russian air attacks on Ukraine that involved more than 1,000 drone and missile strikes.

Dmitry Peskov, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, said that decisions to give Ukraine longer-range missiles were “potentially dangerous” and could frustrate “attempts to reach a settlement” in Ukraine, according to state newswire Tass.

The 500km-plus range of the Taurus cruise missile is further than the Storm Shadows and Scalps supplied by the British and French and the Army Tactical Missile System (Atacms) provided by the US.

Those British, French and American missiles were first used against military targets inside Russia’s Bryansk and Kursk regions in November, when the respective governments quietly lifted geographical restrictions on their use.

Separately, Kyiv has also developed its own Neptune long-range missiles, as well as drones that target Russian territory.

Merz’s comments come as European leaders are racing to come up with a plan to increase pressure on Moscow, after US President Donald Trump signalled he is inclined to leave them to sort the conflict among themselves.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will meet Merz in Aachen in western Germany on Thursday, where EU commission president Ursula von der Leyen is receiving the Charlemagne prize.

British officials said Starmer would talk to Merz about increasing economic pressure on Russia and ensuring Ukraine has the financial and military support it needs to maintain the fight.

Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is due to travel to Berlin on Wednesday, according to Der Spiegel.

With Washington’s commitment to Ukraine’s security seemingly waning, the French, British and German leaders are increasingly divided over how much military support can be provided to Ukraine after the war.

France and the UK, the two instigators of a so-called “coalition of the willing”, have insisted that an initial plan of deploying troops on the ground in Ukraine is still feasible.

Other nations, including Germany, are more sceptical, since the US remains opposed to the idea and has not promised the security “backstop” previously sought by European powers for such a force.

Starmer and Macron continue to back the troops proposal, people involved in the negotiations said, so as to keep Europe involved in the ceasefire talks and maintain Ukrainian morale, as well as demonstrating their commitment to Trump.

One European official said the troops plan was “dead”, since it was “preposterous without the help of Trump, and he’s not willing to provide it”.

But a French diplomat countered that the reports of the proposal’s death were “not only greatly exaggerated” but also “totally untrue”, adding that the countries were still working on the plans “at normal pace”

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