It took German industry an eyebrow-raising 19 months to refurbish and deliver the first 58 of at least 155 Leopard 1A5 tanks a German-led consortium has pledged to Ukraine. But the three-country consortium—Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium—has apparently resolved parts shortages and is finally picking up the pace.
Since those first 58 Leopard 1A5s arrived through early September, an additional 45 of the 1980s-vintage tanks have shipped.
Obviously thank you to Germany Belgium and Netherlands.
But it seems to me kind of embarrassing that Europe isn’t able to deliver more tanks in 3 years than Russia spend in less than a month!The difference is that Russia takes them out of storage, and if they can drive, they’re going to the front. Europe completely refurbished the tanks and sent fully operational (if old) main battle tanks to Ukraine.
Yes I know these are supposed to be better. But essentially these were taken out of storage too. And only being able to supply about 2-3% of what Russia is throwing at Ukraine remains unimpressive IMO even if the quality is higher.
Maybe this is not the top priority compared to other weapons, it just seems like we could do a lot more. After almost 3 years of war we should have been able to build better capacity to help Ukraine.I’m fucking tired of Europe not showing Russia that what they are doing is way beyond unacceptable. We must consider ourselves at war with Russia at this point, with massive Russian hybrid warfare. Countries that can’t get into their heads that the easy way is to supply Ukraine with everything they need, are not paying anything remotely close to due diligence.
