Today, relatively at the end of the month, the German government made the latest deliveries of military equipment to Ukraine to support the defence fight against Russian forces public.
If one looks at the publicly accessible list on the German government’s website, it becomes immediately apparent that it’s a very small list compared to previous publications.
Larger quantities of various firearms and different types of ammunition, as well as drones and armoured vehicles, which are normally supplied, are almost completely missing.
Another explanation to why the list is that small this time is that both the pledged Patriot missiles and the 41 Mercedes-Benz Arocs have disappeared from the list of pledged assistance without being added to the list of assistance already delivered. Although both have actually been delivered.
This results in a relatively small list, which certainly raises the question of shrinking support for Ukraine for one or the other. But let’s have a look at the deliveries of the past three weeks that have now been made public.
- 10 Sonobot 5 USVs
- 8 Leopard 1A5 MBTs
- 2 Bergepanzer 2 ARVs
- 10 ground surveillance radars Ground Observer 12
- 21,000 35mm APDS-T rounds for Gepard/Cheetah SPAAGs
- 24,810 combat helmets M92
- 1 Forward Surgical Team system / role 1
Once again, 10 Sonobot 5 USVs were included, which were already marked as delivered in the previous update at the beginning of July. The small unmanned surface vessels, which are manufactured by the German company EvoLogics, are used by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine to search for unexploded ordnance.
Additional Leopard 1A5 MBTs were also delivered again. With the eight made public today, there are now a total of 58 Leopard 1A5 MBTs in the arsenal of the Ukrainian armed forces.
However, the main battle tanks supplied by Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands are still lagging behind expectations. By the end of 2023, the German government planned to have actually delivered a total of 80 to Ukraine. Now, at the end of June 2024, we are talking about nearly 60 delivered ones.
However, the reasons for the lack of deliveries are well known to the public. For example, various tanks were rejected by the Ukrainian government before they were handed over due to the sometimes serious defects in the tanks that had arisen as a result of the intensive training of Ukrainian soldiers in Germany.
They had also forgotten to train maintenance personnel for months, which is why the existing tanks now have to remain in Germany for longer to train additional personnel.
Also worth mentioning is the urgently needed ammunition for the Gepard and Cheetah SPAAGs supplied by Germany and possibly by the US. A not inconsiderable quantity of freshly produced ammunition was handed over in the form of 21,000 35mm APDS-T rounds.
These are manufactured by Rheinmetall on behalf of the German government. A total of 300,000 rounds of ammunition — 150,000 APDS-T and 150,000 HEI-T — are to be delivered to Ukraine. In the end, this is far more than could originally be scraped together in all corners of the world, since the production of this ammunition had been stopped many years ago.
However, Rheinmetall is also charging a considerable price for the relaunch of production, which incidentally involved some serious difficulties. This essential step costs the German government a low three-digit million euro sum.
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