Germany found itself under intense and growing pressure Sunday as the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz weighed whether to authorize the shipment of its coveted Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.
U.S., Ukrainian and European officials urged Berlin to act after a summit Friday at the American military base in Ramstein, Germany, failed to nail down an agreement.
Ukraine says it needs some 300 Western tanks to bolster its forces against dug-in Russian troops in the eastern and southern parts of the country in the 11-month-old war. Both sides are preparing for further offensives when the weather allows.
An intelligence assessment of the fighting over the weekend from the British Defense Ministry described an increasingly deadlocked struggle in Ukraine’s Donbas region, with new Russian overall commander Sergei Shoigu reorganizing forces and apparently settling in for a long, grinding war of attrition.
Germany has balked at supplying Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine or authorizing other European countries such as Poland to transfer their own Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, in part because of divisions within Mr. Scholz’s coalition government and in part for fear that the move would prove too provocative to the Kremlin.
Officials in Berlin have suggested an agreement to ship the Leopards in tandem with a U.S. move to authorize the heavy-armored M1 Abrams tank, but the Biden administration has rejected that move.
“Today’s indecision is killing more of our people,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, tweeted Sunday. “Every day of delay is the death of Ukrainians. Think faster.”
Frustration from others
A delegation of U.S. lawmakers and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also expressed frustration with the delays during visits to Kyiv in recent days.
“I am tired of the s—- show of who is going to send tanks and when they are going to send them,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican, told reporters. “To the Germans: Send tanks to Ukraine because they need the tanks. It is in your interest that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin loses in Ukraine.”
Mr. Scholz, known as a cautious politician at home, led a large delegation of German officials and lawmakers to Paris on Sunday to mark the 60th anniversary of a friendship treaty signed in the early 1960s.
He gave no sign of movement on the tank issue in brief remarks to reporters, but he said France and Germany were prepared to back Ukraine in the war for “as long as it takes.”
“The U.S. is doing a lot. Germany is doing a lot, too,” the chancellor said. “We have constantly expanded our deliveries with very effective weapons that are already available today. And we have always coordinated all these decisions closely with our important allies and friends.”
Two top U.S. lawmakers said the Biden administration should move quickly to supply at least a token shipment of Abrams tanks to Ukraine to provide Mr. Scholz and his government with diplomatic cover.
“What I hear is that Germany’s waiting on us to take the lead,” Rep. Michael T. McCaul, Texas Republican and House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”
Sen. Christopher A. Coons, a Delaware Democrat who is close to Mr. Biden and sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “If it requires our sending some Abrams tanks in order to unlock getting the Leopard tanks from Germany, from Poland, from other allies, I would support that.”
Poland eager
Poland, Ukraine’s western neighbor and one of its strongest backers inside NATO, said it might transfer more than a dozen of its German-made Leopards to Kyiv without authorization if Berlin continues to delay. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told Agence France-Presse on Sunday that Germany’s attitude “is unacceptable.”
Ukraine and its allies “will win this war with Germany or without it,” he said.
Top diplomats of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia — three Baltic nations that were once part of the Soviet Union and now are members of NATO — issued a rare joint public statement Saturday criticizing Germany’s failure to act.
The Biden administration and Western European allies of the U.S. appear to be applying pressure behind the scenes on Mr. Scholz’s government while in public giving Berlin time and space to make its decision.
Germany has done a huge amount already, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly told Sky News on Sunday. He said he strongly supported supplying the tanks to Kyiv, “and it’s worth remembering that they come from a very different starting point in terms of their defense posture.”
In a first sign that the pressure campaign may be working, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock told a French television interviewer late Sunday that the door may be open for allies to pass along their German-made Leopards to Kyiv, even if Germany does not.
“For the moment, the question has not been asked, but if we were asked, we would not stand in the way,” she said.
Russian threats
Russia is stepping up warnings that the massive flow of U.S. and other Western aid to Ukraine is making the risk of an ever-larger war more likely by the day.
Vyacheslav Volodin, the speaker of the Russian parliament and an ally of Mr. Putin, warned that a “global catastrophe” is brewing if the arms flow continues.
“If Washington and NATO countries supply weapons that will be used to strike civilian cities and attempt to seize our territories, as they threaten, this will lead to retaliatory measures using more powerful weapons,” Mr. Volodin said on the Telegram messaging app.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested over the weekend that the tank impasse would soon be addressed, but he also launched an unusually pointed attack on Mr. Putin and the cost of his war in Ukraine.
The war — and the economic and security blowback for Russia since it began in February 2022 — are “a tragedy brought on by Putin,” Mr. Blinken said in a discussion Friday evening at the Chicago-based Institute of Politics.
“The question that one would really love to ask the Russians, if we could speak more directly and clearly to them, is: How is what Putin is doing in Ukraine — how has that changed your life for the better? How has it done a single thing that makes you better off?”
• This article is based in part on wire service reports.
• David R. Sands can be reached at dsands@washingtontimes.com.
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