Ukraine has been asking the federal government for deliveries of German battle tanks for months. The SPD in particular, led by Chancellor Scholz, repeatedly refuses. Mykhailo Podoliak, adviser to the Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, sees progress.
The adviser to the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Mykhailo Podoliak, expects an agreement with the German government on the delivery of Western battle and infantry fighting vehicles to be reached quickly. “We continue to work hard and are also successful,” says Podoljak in an interview with “Welt am Sonntag”. “I think that we will find a consensus with our German partners for the tanks. (…) We are ready to pay any price for the security of Europe. But help us with weapons!”
According to Podoljak, the further course of the war depends on supplies of weapons from the West, for example the recapture of areas in southern and eastern Ukraine. “We can’t keep up if they have 10,000 tanks and we only have 100. Tanks in particular can provide acceleration on the battlefield and liberate places in the Kherson, Zaporizhia, Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” says the adviser. “And Germany could give us the best possible help with the Leopard and Marder tanks.”
The federal government has so far refused to supply western-style tanks to Ukraine. Led by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the SPD in particular is reluctant to do so, arguing that Germany should not go it alone. Chancellor Wolfgang Schmidt even rejected tank deliveries with a Nazi comparison: “Sometimes I’m tempted to call it the V2 syndrome of the Germans,” said Schmidt: A miracle weapon that, like magic, ensures that things get done. “And now there’s the Leopard 2. That silver bullet that’s going to end the war. And it won’t.”
Military experts, on the other hand, point to the importance of tanks in Ukraine’s defence. “Without mechanized reserves, Kyiv would have been surrounded and probably also fallen,” said Gustav Gressel from the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) in an interview with ntv.de. “But these devices have now been put under heavy use. In net terms, Ukraine loses 75 main battle tanks per month.”
The German ring exchange with Greece is therefore no help for the Ukrainian military. “First of all, these tanks from Greece are in poor condition, some of them only good as a spare parts store,” says Gressel. Above all, the Greek armored personnel carrier model is a danger for the crew: “The BMP-1 explodes at the first hit and burns out. Often the Ukrainian soldiers don’t go into battle in the tank, but sit on the outside of it.”
Greece is to receive a total of 40 Marder infantry fighting vehicles from Germany. For this purpose, 40 Soviet-designed BMP-1 armored personnel carriers, which Athens had once received from GDR stocks, are to be delivered to the Ukraine.
(This article was first published on Sunday, October 30, 2022.)
