466 vehicles of two different types, worth over €356 million. This is the deal that the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence is known to have concluded with the German defence company FFG, while the German Ministry of Defence takes over financing.
With these vehicles, Germany wants to strengthen the Ukrainian army in its fight against the Russian aggression. However, the entire project has long had a questionable standing.
A quick overview. Apart from the fact that the choice of vehicles makes not a lot of sense considering alternative options, the first 66 of them were delivered without any mine protection at all, although they were announced as “armoured combat vehicles”.
In addition, compared to sales offers of the US base model, the BATT UMG, the German government pays more than €400,000 extra per vehicle to have the final assembly of them carried out by a German company.
And to top it all off, the deliveries of MRAPs are falling far behind the expectations of the German Ministry of Defence.
While there have already been endless debates about the first points mentioned, and I would rather not bother you again with statements like “announced as armoured combat vehicles, but the manufacturer says they were never intended for combat”, we finally have an official answer as to why the delivery of the vehicles is so extremely delayed.
After all, only 26 of the 400 pledged FFG MRAPs have been delivered so far and the project was supposed to be completed by the end of the year, according to a recent statement published on the YouTube channel of the German Bundeswehr.
Image: Julian RöpckeAnswering questions of BILD journalist Julian Röpcke, the German Ministry of Defence shifted the blame away from itself as well as from FFG and onto US authorities, which have to approve arms exports to other countries in advance.
This is because the FFG APCs and FFG MRAPs are not independently developed vehicles, but only licence-produced BATT UMG IMVs, which are marketed under a different name by the German company FFG Flensburger Fahrzeugbau Gesellschaft mbH.
According to the German Ministry of Defence, the export was approved late by US authorities, which ultimately delayed work on the vehicles in Germany.
I have to admit that I consider the tone of what is being said towards the US, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s most important ally, to be relatively unusually harsh.
But even a delayed approval by US authorities cannot, in my opinion, be the sole reason for the extreme delay in the delivery of the vehicles.
A classified document from the Ministry of Defence dated May 2024 reveals that they expected the delivery of at least 20 vehicles from June 2024 through to December 2024.
This would mean that, according to German estimates, at least 140 MRAPs could have been delivered to Ukraine by the end of the year. Why give a realistic estimate internally (140 vehicles) and completely exaggerate in public (400 vehicles)? A good question!
As already mentioned, due to a three-month delay in delivery and a weak October in which only four instead of at least 20 FFG MRAPs were delivered, only a total of 26 vehicles have been delivered so far.
Even if we assume that the minimum goal will be reached again in November and December, it is very likely that only around 70 vehicles will be delivered by the end of the year — possibly even less.
In other words, only around 50% of internal expectations will be met by the end of the year and just around 17.5% of what was publicly announced.
Catastrophic figures when Ukrainian soldiers are very depended on deliveries from their international partners while they are facing life or death situations every day on the battlefield.
But eventually, the Ukrainians will have to live with these figures. Perhaps there is hope that we can still catch up a little by pulling off a trick or two. After all, as we all know, hope is the last to die…
Editor’s note: About an hour after the article was published, the German government published the latest deliveries of military equipment to Ukraine, including 47 additional FFG MRAPs.
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