A ’50-50′ chance: Ukraine gets armor but not tanks they need
Joel Gehrke
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An assembly of Western defense officials ended without Germany agreeing to send tanks to Ukraine, but an influx of other armored vehicles has set the stage for an impending clash of Russian and Ukrainian forces.
“To be honest, the probability that they win or they lose is 50-50,” a senior German military official told the Washington Examiner while discussing an expected Russian offensive this spring. “The more the Ukrainians can continue to mobilize their forces and we continue to equip them … the higher the probability that the Russian offensive fails and the more likely it becomes that Ukraine seizes more of its terrain than they have seized and reconquered currently.”
The doubtful tone of that assessment flows in part from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hesitance to allow Ukraine to acquire any of the German-made Leopard tanks scattered throughout European militaries. NATO member officials expect Russia to launch a major new offensive this spring, one that puts pressure on Ukrainian and Western officials to prevent Moscow from regaining the upper hand in the war despite a year of defeats.
“We have a window of opportunity here, you know, between now and the spring … whenever they commence their operation, their counteroffensive,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters after the meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. “And that’s not a long time, and we have to pull together the right capabilities.”
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President Joe Biden’s administration endorsed Ukraine’s bid to acquire Western tanks in recent weeks, in part because allied officials expect Russia to use its own heavy armored forces to roll through Ukrainian defenses. It was possible for Ukrainian infantry to repulse Russian columns around Kyiv in April because the terrain gave advantages to the defenders, who were armed with shoulder-launched missiles, but the Ukrainian forces need far heavier weaponry to hold their ground further east.
“They will try to make a breakthrough somewhere, and to counter this breakthrough, you have to be mobile, you have to be active, you have to be protected, and that only works when you have your own armored fighting vehicles and tanks,” the senior German military official said. “If you are in trenches and they manage to make a breakthrough at some point, how can you stop them? … You can’t run with [Ukrainian] infantry behind [Russian] armor.”
Poland, which already has donated about 250 Soviet-style tanks to Ukraine, has offered to send a squadron of its own Leopards to Ukraine, but Germany is entitled to veto those exports. Newly minted German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius maintained that his government still must “balance all the pros and contras” of the step.
“I am very sure that there will be a decision in the short term, but I don’t know how the decision will look,” Pistorius told reporters.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made the tanks a centerpiece of his appeal for more aid in recent months, but he adopted an optimistic posture about the other heavy weapons on offer.
“We’ve managed to significantly strengthen our artillery fist,” Zelensky said in a Friday evening update. “We have good results with armored vehicles — several hundred combat vehicles have been added to our arsenal. Significant results concerning rockets for multiple launch rocket systems and our anti-aircraft guns.”
Those assets could allow Ukrainian forces to “preempt” the Russian invasion, even in the absence of the German tanks. U.S. Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, characterized the last two American aid packages to Ukraine as the “equivalent to at least two combined arms maneuver brigades or six mech infantry battalions, 10 motorized infantry battalions, and four artillery battalions, along with a lot of other equipment” that could play a crucial role in the months ahead.
“It’s not the end of the world if Scholz says no to Leopards because there’s a whole lot of armor coming in,” said former Ambassador Bill Taylor. “These infantry fighting vehicles, those are capable weapons … and the Ukrainians will use them very well. They’ll use them like tanks. So Scholz is not the bottom line.”
The key question, Milley suggested, is the speed at which Ukrainian forces can make use of the weapons they’re given.
“If you look at the weather and terrain, etc., you can see that you have a relatively short window of time to accomplish both those key tasks,” Milley said. “The equipment’s got to get married up with the people, and people have got to get trained on the equipment. And all of that’s going to have to get shipped in — into Ukraine, etc., all put together inside of a coherent plan.”
If Western officials have missed an opportunity to give Ukraine the tanks that it needs, it remains possible that Russian officials will fail to exploit their possible advantage.
“The fundamental problems of the Russians are still there,” the senior German military official said, citing their low morale and ineffective leadership. “They have logistic challenges because they are poorly organized. Corruption is still an issue … so the problems for them will not disappear.”
Still, some Western officials fear that Russia will compensate for those shortcomings with the sheer quantity of men they can mobilize unless Kyiv can short-circuit Moscow’s plans with an offensive of its own.
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“The Russians just have more — many, many more people … but they need time,” Taylor said. “If [the war] grinds, the bigger country has an advantage. But if the smaller country strikes early, it takes away that advantage.”