Tanks going to Ukraine as the 12th month of the war begins

The Leopard 2 tanks are headed for Ukraine after a lively several days of diplomatic theater involving particularly Germany, the US, Poland, and Ukraine. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung reports:

The [German] goal is to quickly put together two tank battalions with Leopard 2 for Ukraine. That would be around 90 tanks.

In a first step, Germany will provide a company with 14 Leopards of the modern type 2A6 from Bundeswehr stocks, as well as ammunition and support for training and logistics. Defense Minister Boris Pistorius added that the tanks are expected to be delivered by the end of April. He announced that in a second step, presumably more Leopard 2 of the older model 2A4 will be provided. However, this will take some time, he said. (my translation)

The Guardian provides this count of who currently have which Leopard 2 tanks:

The Guardian also takes the view that the internal German politics played out the way SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz would presumably have hoped:

Reports of the German decision were welcomed in the country by the German government’s three coalition partners and the leading opposition party, and criticised by the far right and far left.

“The announcement that Leopard tanks will also be sent from Germany to Ukraine is very good news,” said Anton Hofreiter, the Green party chair of the Bundestag’s European affairs committee. Kyiv had to be supported “until the Putin regime understands that negotiations are a better option than continuing the war”, Hofreiter told RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland.

Florian Hahn, the defence policy spokesperson of the conservative CDU/CSU party bloc that makes up the leading opposition in Germany’s parliament, added: “Chancellor Scholz and the SPD has finally given up its crazy resistance.” (my emphasis)

There’s apparently some rumbling from German arms manufacturers that they will somehow lose business over Germany’s supposed (feigned?) dithering over providing Leopard 2’s to Ukraine. But this may just be lobbying posturing.

Meanwhile, it looks like Ukraine had to make a compromise or two as part of this winter repositioning:

The biggest shake-up of Ukraine's government since Russia's full-scale invasion underlines President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's need to show key Western partners and war-weary Ukrainians that he is serious about tackling corruption and punishing misrule.

The abrupt exit of more than a dozen officials in recent days followed a series of scandals and graft allegations, including one involving the Defence Ministry that had sparked a public outcry despite being denied. ...

Russia's invasion has made the country more reliant than ever on Western support, particularly in the form of military aid, and the international community has made clear it wants to see Ukrainian governance improve.

This will probably not get a lot of comment from people on social media who like to post “Glory to Ukraine!” and predict imminent victory for Our Side if only NATO would do whatever Zelenskyy says. But the quality of governance, political stability, and security on intelligence matters are obviously big concerns of Ukraine’s de facto NATO allies.

Even if the war were to end tomorrow, Ukraine would be in awful shape going forward. And every month the war continues means more destruction in the country, more deaths, and more refugees leaving, many of whom may never live permanently in Ukraine again. A near-term end of the war would leave Ukraine years away from meeting the standards for EU and NATO membership, maybe two decades or more.

Estimates from major economic institutions on reconstruction costs for Ukraine over the last year have varied widely. Not surprising given that the length of the war and the amount of the eventual destruction are very much unknown at the moment. In June 2022, Werner Hoyer, the head of the European Investment Bank (EIB) floated a €1 trillion estimate, noting that Europe would likely have to provide most of the funds.

And because any estimate at this point would have to include some assumption about the length of the war and severity of the damage, various countries, international institutions, and think tanks would also have to be mindful of how those assumptions might be interpreted by various players in the propaganda contests in process.

The US is providing substantial aid and so is the EU. The US will surely expect the EU to bear the main cost of postwar reconstruction. As it is, much of the aid the EU is currently providing is in the form of loans with deferred payments. “Overall, the EU’s strategy is simply a recipe for a future Ukrainian sovereign debt crisis,” writes Eoin Drea.

The reality is that brave, bombarded and economically ravaged Ukraine needs a debt deal to win the coming peace. And if Kyiv is to have a realistic chance of a post-war recovery, this deal should include significant debt restructuring and the transfer of tens of billions of euros in non-repayable grants.

With an inflation rate of 26 percent, interest rates of 25 percent and a one-third decline in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2022, Ukraine is reaching the limits of existing, conventional economic policy.

Soon, Kyiv will have to resort to the printing press to finance daily public services. And as the Germans, the Dutch and others often like to remind Europe, this will lead to economic catastrophe.

Ukraine has already deferred payments until 2024 on up to €20 billion of its debt held by international investors. And while the approximate €6 billion that the country has saved through this action is important, it pales in comparison to its expected budgetary shortfall of approximately €40 billion in 2023 alone.

Ukraine needs a debt write-off — unfortunately, the EU just wants it to keep borrowing. (my emphasis)

Yanis Varoufakis recently speculated on the kind of problems the EU could face with financing reconstruction. It's not going to be easy.

Germany publicly agrees that Leopard 2 tanks can be provided to Ukraine

The public pantomime over German Leopard 2 tanks, in which Washington and eastern NATO allies grumple and gripe about how Germany need to provide the tanks while Germany carefully reminds France and the rest of the world that they are committed but reflective New Cold Warriors, continues to play out. With Ukraine talking as if it’s already part of NATO and publicly shaming NATO to give them more arms and even to directly enter the war against Russia, of course.

Now that everyone has gotten their latest round of practice with their preferred public rhetoric, the tanks are going to Ukraine. Presumably a surprise to no one who has actually been following the controversy beyond reading the headlines.

Germany would not “stand in the way” of Poland sending Leopard tanks to Ukraine, foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has said, in what appeared to be the clearest signal yet from Berlin that European allies could deliver the German-made hardware.

Asked in an interview with French television station LCI what would happen if Poland sent its Leopard 2 tanks without German approval, Baerbock replied through a translator: “For the moment the question has not been asked, but if we were asked we would not stand in the way.” (my emphasis)

The German tanks are sold to other European allies including Poland on the condition they will not provide them to other countries without prior German approval. Poland has been implying that German was refusing to let them send the tanks to Ukraine. The German Foreign Minister here is diplomatically stating that Poland had made no formal request for such a transfer. Even before the German decision was announced, the Polish government seemed to be acknowledging that indeed it had not made the formal request previously.

One of the cutesy controversies over the last few days was the new German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius’ (SPD) comment that he had instructed his ministry to compile a count of how many Leopard 2 tanks were available. This prompted talk-show commentary along the lines of, “Whut, nobody’s even bothered to count the number of tanks they have?” TV pundits just wanna have fun, I guess.

But WELT News somehow has a count of which countries have how many Leopard 2’s.

Poland has offered to send Leopard 2’s and provide training on them. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz got to publicly tweak the US a bit by suggesting they should send Abrams tanks to Ukraine, which are even more high-tech than the Leopards. Which means that Russians capturing Abrams tanks. But my understanding is that the Leopards require less fuel that the Abrams do, so that is a fairly obvious advantage to the Leopards. And the Leopards also use diesel fuel, which is more readily available in Ukraine.

But those of us who aren’t TV pundits can assume that Scholz’ government is happy to have provoked comments like this from officials of allied countries demanding they send more weapons:

The bosses of 24 major [British] Commons committees and dozens of other senior backbenchers have written to the German Defence Minister “at this moment of extreme urgency.” …

The MPs letter to Federal Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius reads: “We are conscious of the very significant efforts Germany has made to support Ukraine, especially over the last twelve months. We understand the historic reasons for reluctance to provide German and German-made tanks.

“However, we would urge you at this moment of extreme urgency, to reconsider your position and allow Leopard 2 battle tanks – both German-owned and German-built – to be provided to Ukraine in the next few days.”

There are several varieties of the Leopard 2 tank. Presumably few if any of the most advanced versions will go to Ukraine to minimize the likelihood they could be captured by the Russians.

DW News takes the public positioning more-or-less at face value in this brief report:

(This post is also available on Substack with detailed footnotes.)

German rearmament, the "turning point" for the EU, and the Leopard 2 tanks

Ukraine is requesting/demanding advanced German Leopold 2 tanks for their current war against Russian invasion. Deutsche Welle has this current report:

Additional Deutsche Welle reports: Is German reluctance to send tanks undermining the country as a reliable European partner? 01/20/2023 and Why has Germany still not decided on Leopard 2 tank supplies to Ukraine? 01/20/2023.

What’s behind the current debate?

First, Germany and the rest of NATO are actively supporting Ukraine in its war against the Russian invasion, even though Ukraine is not a NATO member and would, even if the war stopped today, be years away from qualifying to join the alliance. NATO ascension involves meeting a rigorous set of standards, not least among them: “Invitees are also required to implement measures to ensure the protection of NATO classified information, and prepare their security and intelligence services to work with the NATO Office of Security.“ Just as with US decisions on which weapons to supply Ukraine and how many and when, the argument is over timing, quantity, and, of course, the types of weapons to be provided.

The US just announced another $2 billion package of military aid to Ukraine, including “[90] Stryker armored vehicles, 59 more Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and a large number of rockets and artillery rounds.”

The US just announced another $2 billion package of military aid to Ukraine, including “[90] Stryker armored vehicles, 59 more Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and a large number of rockets and artillery rounds.”

Second, in the EU and in NATO, the European nations have long practiced a kind of “good cop, bad cop” routine, in which eastern countries like Poland and the Balkan states take the bad-cop role of warning about the dangers from Russia and demand more and faster measures against them, including NATO expansion. While the Western countries and Germany in particular take the good-cop position of trying to draw Russia into more cooperative and mutually-dependent relationships with the goal of reducing the risks of war. (This is not meant to imply that the public positions are phony, but rather to emphasize their function in diplomacy.)

The long-standing German position was known as the Wandel durch Wandel (change through trade) strategy. Controversial deals like the NordStream 2 pipeline were part of this approach. Although the profit motive of course played a significant role, left lingering suspicious of corruption, and produced more than a few statements by political figures that since last February’s invasion are painfully embarrassing in retrospect.

Third, the German slogan of Wandel durch Handel has now been superseded by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’ declaration of a Zeitenwende, a “turning point,” in which a boosting of German and European military power is a central priority, along with a concentrated effort to reduce or eliminate Europe’s dependency on Russian oil and gas.

From my own understanding of the last 150 years of European history, “Germany is committed to massive rearmament” will never sound like entirely good news.

On the other hand, the fears of the internal opposition to rearmament by West Germany in the 1950s that it could lead to new militarism and imperialist adventures were not realized in the rearmament and NATO membership that actually took place. (Much to the regret of some German rightwingers, no doubt.)

Fourth, the Zeitenwende has created a new urgency for both a more unified EU foreign policy and for a much more robust and independent EU military capability. With the Trumpist takeover of the US Republican Party, the Republicans - and Donald Trump in particular - are more-or-less hostile to both NATO and the EU. Even during the Clinton Administration and ever since, the general American preference was a larger but less cohesive European Union that would be both useful in stabilizing post-Soviet Europe but also incapable of becoming a “peer competitor” of the US. And the January 6, 2021 Trumpist insurrection in Washington showed the EU that they can no longer be so assured of US defense support in case of Russian aggression.

If the grotesquely hawkish John Bolton can be believed, Trump in a second term “may well have withdrawn from NATO. And I think Putin was waiting for that.”

The immediate effect of the Russia-Ukraine War was to strengthen NATO and US leadership within it, although the US has always been the unquestioned leader of the alliance. But the US began its “pivot" or "tilt" toward Asia in 2011 during the Obama Administration, more than a decade ago. This vision of the US priority being competition against China as a rising world power continued through the Trump Administration, even though crediting Trump’s government with anything so grand as a foreign policy “vision” sounds a bit dubious.

John Bateman of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has recently argued that the Biden-Harris Administration’s economic sanctions against China are potentially much more drastic in their effects than the foreign policy commentariat has recognized:

U.S.-led technological decoupling from China has had enormous consequences in just a few short years. It has rewired international relationships, unsettled the global economic order, and transformed technology policymaking and politics in many countries. In this high-stakes game, Washington has been both card player and card dealer, making its own moves while constraining the choices of others. Now the United States has gone all-in—wagering like never before and placing its cards on the table for all to see. The decisive U.S. gamble: to openly block China’s path to becoming an advanced economic peer, even at significant risk to U.S. and allied interests. Bigger U.S. moves are probably coming in the future. (my emphasis)

China and Europe are mutually important trading partners, so the tightening economic sanctions against China also affect Europe, at the same time that Europe has officially over a decade ago become a secondary strategic concern of the US after China. The current war has not changed that prioritization.

It’s generally assumed that unity in the EU is dependent on France and Germany acting in accord. Since France is the only nuclear power in the EU, a genuinely independent European defense capability against Russia would have to include a French guarantee of a “nuclear umbrella.” Especially if the US were to leave NATO altogether.

However, the newer NATO members that are also EU members have at times sided with US on security issues against the positions of France and Germany, notably during the Iraq War. And countries like Poland and the Baltic states are more immediately interested in the nuclear umbrella that NATO provides than they are in following the lead of Germany and France. At the same time, France and Germany also know that the current strengthening of NATO could undercut their ability to develop a robust EU defense force. While they also realize that having the former Warsaw Pact countries that are now in the EU, will need to be increasingly reliant on German and French armaments than on American ones i order to reduce the ability of the US to promote inner-EU division between what Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld called a good (i.e., more hawkish and pro-American) “new Europe” (good) and the bad “old Europe”.

So what’s the deal with the tanks?

Immediately after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s Chancellor Scholz announced a €100 billion defense-buildup fund and, in addition, Germany’s intent to raise its defense spending to 2% of its GDP, i.e., an increase by a third over what it was spending in 2021. Germany had agreed to such a target in 2014 but has not yet met it.

The current hullabaloo is around Ukraine’s demand that Germany provide Leopard 2 tanks. Welt news in a long report on NATO weapons for Ukraine featured this table showing five EU countries and their supply of Leopard 2's:

How long it will take for German weapons manufacturers to provide substantial numbers of the Leopard 2 tanks is a matter of some dispute. But it's not as though they are able to crank out dozens of new Leopard 2 tanks in the next couple of weeks. Germany is in the process of a big military buildup of its own capabilities. So it's understandable that the government may have some reluctance to reduce its own preparedness by sending its own tanks to Ukraine.

And it's obvious from this table that Poland has more of these tanks than Germany itself does. And Spain has almost as many as Germany. So there is an obvious practical issue here. And this isn’t the only one. The Ukrainians have to be trained on these very advanced tanks, and they are a lot more complicated than driving a car. There is also an important security consideration, which is that the NATO countries don’t want the Russians capturing any of those tanks.

So the public recriminations we’re currently seeing over the Leopard 2 tanks is in no small part another episode of the good-cop/bad-cop routine. Everyone expects Ukraine to make maximum demands of its allies, even if calls for direct NATO combat engagement with Russia, e.g., a no-fly zone, are surely more than a little annoying in Washington and other NATO capitals. And eastern European or American public griping about how Germany is dragging its feet on the tanks is also good politics for Rumsfeld’s “new Europe” leaders. And it provides some amount of political cover for the German government in the face of concerns by other countries of “old Europe” and also from domestic antiwar critics on the right (the Putinist far-right AfD/Alternative für Deutschland) and the left (part of the Left Party and some of Scholz’ Social Democrats). The German Greens are pretty much solidly hawkish on supporting Ukraine.

It’s of course considered bad form by most media outlets and foreign policy institutes to give close scrutiny to the influence of military lobbyists. But this surely looks like a new golden age for them. And like a good opportunity for conservative politicians who prefer a hawkish posture anyway.

In the meantime, we’ll likely see more news stories along this line:

The continued delay in a decision comes after days of bewildering signals from German officials about whether they would allow the Leopard 2 tanks to go to Ukraine. 

Allies have been imploring Germany to dispatch a fleet of Europe’s Leopard tanks to Kyiv’s forces. Berlin holds the key, given that it both manages its own cache of Leopards and must approve other countries’ donations of the German-made vehicle.

But Scholz has been reluctant to make a move, signaling both publicly and privately that he wants the U.S. to move first and ship its own tanks to Ukraine.

It’s part of the post-Zeitenwende world.