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After weeks of excuses and foot-dragging, the Germans have finally said yes to transferring a limited number of their Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine and agreed they wouldn’t stand in the way of other European countries’ re-exporting the Teutonic tanks from their stocks.
Everything suggests the Biden administration forced that decision by killing the last of Germany’s feeble excuses — namely that Berlin was not ready to act alone but only in concert with Washington. Walking back the Pentagon’s earlier accounts of how impractical, complex and ultimately unhelpful US tanks would be in the conflict with Russia, President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that America would provide Ukraine 31 M1 Abrams tanks.
Do not get too excited. Ukrainian officials stress that their military needs hundreds of tanks to fight off the Russians. As of now, the hope that the United States, Germany and other allies will collectively send, say, 100 tanks to Ukraine over the course of 2023 might prove overly optimistic. Will that be enough for Ukrainians to take initiative on the battlefield and drive the Russians out?
“With spring approaching,” Biden said Wednesday, Ukrainian forces “need to be able to counter Russia’s evolving tactics and strategy on the battlefield in the very near term.” But we may still be months away from seeing any Western tanks fighting in Ukraine.
While the United States has large stocks of Abrams tanks the Marine Corps previously used, those would need to be adapted for export — including by removing some sensitive electronics and other equipment we would like to keep only for ourselves, for good reason.
