ZBetween the Netherlands and Germany there has been irritation about the delivery of Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Ukraine. The German Defense Ministry on Friday dismissed reports from The Hague that Berlin was blocking the transfer of 18 tanks to Kiev that the Netherlands had leased from Germany. “I am not aware that there was an official request that would then have been rejected by the federal government,” said a spokeswoman for the ministry on Friday of the German Press Agency in Berlin.
On the other hand, the Dutch media reported on an appearance by Defense Minister Kasja Ollongren in the Defense Committee of the Chamber of Deputies. Accordingly, Ollongren said that the transfer of the leased 2A6 tanks was “not in sight” because Berlin had refused. “It was a military consideration,” she was quoted as saying. Otherwise the cabinet was ready to do so.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte told the FAZ at the end of January that his government was considering buying back the leased tanks and donating them to Ukraine. When asked about it at the European Council in Brussels on Thursday, Rutte said his country would like to be part of the Leopard 2 coalition and is discussing this with its partners. But it could also be that the leased tanks would be better used in Lithuania. They belong to a German-Dutch tank battalion.
“My impression is that it works”
Scholz used the meeting of the heads of government in Brussels to “ask many to actively support them,” as he said afterwards. So far, however, the only thing that is certain is that Germany and Poland will each deliver 14 Leopard 2 tanks. Spain, Portugal and Canada, which have also expressed an interest, have yet to make a national decision. Scholz was nonetheless optimistic: “My impression is that it’s working,” said the SPD politician on Friday night.
In Poland, meanwhile, Ukrainian soldiers have started training on Leopard tanks. This emerges from a video by the Reuters agency on Friday, which was recorded at the military training area near Bunzlau in Silesia. The Polish army maintains a Leopard 2A4 brigade there and a training center for the crews of its approximately 240 Leopard tanks, which otherwise only exists in Germany and Switzerland.
It has five tanks for “driving school purposes” and simulators. Major Maciej Banaszyński, head of the center, said in the post that for retraining from a “post-Soviet” to a Leopard or Abrams generation tank “ten weeks is quite enough.” If you “intensify the training at the expense of the instructors, at the expense of the weekends, we can retrain a crew within five weeks”. According to the report, mechanics are also trained at Bunzlau; that takes three to six months.
The first of these tanks should therefore be delivered to Ukraine “towards the end of April”. So far it is unclear whether Poland will also provide spare parts for damaged Leopards. Poland’s President Andrzej Duda has announced a speech and a meeting with Ukrainian soldiers near Bunzlau on Monday. At the last Ramstein meeting in January, Defense Minister Mariusz Błaszczak said Poland could “train Ukrainian soldiers up to the size of a brigade by the end of March”; However, this applies to the Soviet model T-72, of which Poland wants to give Kiev more copies.
