Interview with Lambrecht: “The helmets also saved lives”

Madam Minister, a week and a half ago you promised our Polish neighbors help with anti-aircraft defense and offered to deploy several Patriot systems. Her Polish colleague initially reacted enthusiastically. But then the nationalist PiS government suddenly wanted the Patriots to be stationed in Ukraine. Do you feel a little duped by them?

Poland is particularly exposed – that became clear with the tragic rocket impact with two fatalities. It was and is important to me to support Poland as a good neighbor and close ally in these difficult times. Hence this offer – air surveillance and defense with Eurofighters and Patriots. I received very positive feedback on this from my counterpart, and our teams immediately started planning. Then, in the middle of last week, there was a completely unexpected turn, and since then we have been observing a very lively debate in Poland. We keep our offer.

The offer is called: stationing of German patriots with German garrison on Polish soil.

That’s the offer.

Germany also offered to set up a kind of repair and maintenance station in Poland for the worn-out Panzerhaubitzen 2000 that we delivered to the Ukraine. Is this project going?

We have since reached an agreement with Slovakia. The German industry is now – on our behalf – busy with the construction of the service center. That will be up until mid-December. A large spare parts package with around 14,000 parts is provided for this. It is important that the systems close to the border can be repaired quickly. So far they have been repaired in Lithuania. It was great cooperation and we are very grateful to Lithuania for this support. With Slovakia, the transport routes from the Ukraine are now becoming significantly shorter.

There are reports that the majority of the delivered howitzers are no longer operational due to wear and tear. Is that true? And what about the ammunition?

Our self-propelled howitzers are used extensively in this battle because they are highly accurate and very effective. This leads to high wear. That’s why we made sure from the start that spare parts were included. As for ammunition, not only did we supply plenty of it ourselves, but we also made sure that the howitzers could fire the 155-millimeter shells that other countries supplied to Ukraine.

Some recent criticism has focused on ammunition shortages. Your own coalition partners have been complaining about this for weeks and months. Projectiles and rockets worth more than 20 billion euros are missing. What are you doing?