All the gear, no idea

A year in and Europe is still playing war games

To pull off his unexpected electoral victory in 2021, Olaf Scholz redefined himself as the heir to Angela Merkel – Germany’s improbably popular four-term chancellor.

We know now that this was worse than political cynicism; he actually meant it. Scholz’s pattern of repeated footdragging followed by inevitable concession in providing military support to Ukraine perfectly mirrors the Merkel method throughout the 2008-2015 financial and debt crisis.

Everyone knows Berlin’s resistance to allowing the export of 100 Leopard-2 main battle tanks (MBTs) to Ukraine will break. Scholz had to go through the same multi-week process over providing Kyiv with Marder armoured personnel carriers and a Patriot missile battery. And all the same no-to-yes signs are flashing. Scholz told a group of US politicians at the Davos World Economic Forum that he would send MBTs if someone else (preferably the Americans) went first. He then authorised his new defence minister Boris Pistorius to tell a meeting of Ukraine’s allies in Ramstein that the army would pre-assess how many Leopards it can spare. This would mean that, once the allies came to a decision, they would be ready to go.

The German position has now reached peak ridiculous. There’s no pending allied decision. There’s just a German veto – not only on exporting some of its own MBTs but on allowing the re-export of Leopards used by or ordered by other armed forces. Scholz’s first-mover problem has been removed by the British decision to send 14 Challenger-2 MBTs to Ukraine. The Americans could export some of their M1 Abrams tanks but the Ukrainians don’t want them in large part because they consume huge amounts of kerosene.

The joy of Leopard-2s is that they run on diesel, can strike a target three kilometres away while moving, and are plentiful throughout Europe. Poland and Finland are ready to supply Leopards now and – once they have German permission – will form the core of a consortium to get 100 MBTs into Ukraine. With crew training already underway and a fair wind, the Ukrainians could have a credible mobile armoured force ready for a spring counteroffensive – including MBTs and infantry fighting vehicles. This is critical if Ukraine is to have any hope of doing any more than containing Russian forces this year. With HIMARS multiple-rocket systems less effective now the Russians have retreated, they need manoeuvrable heavy weapons.

Libyan lessons

Scholz’s hesitancy isn’t just bad diplomacy. As a German historian and expert on Russian military history, half-joked ...

It’s also bad politics. Forsa's regular ntv-trendbarometer conducted on 10-16 January put Scholz's Social Democrats (SPD) in third place nationally at 18%, trailing the Greens at 20% and the opposition Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) at 28%. And it's not like he's spilling votes to the left due to his militarism since Die Linke are polling at 5%. The same survey found Germans to be perfectly split on sending MBTs at 46/46% but support rose to 51% among SPD voters, and to 62-63% among Greens and Free Democrats – Scholz’s two coalition partners – and 54% among opposition voters. Although 74% of the electorate wants peace talks to begin now – they are still Germans after all – only 24% favour the lifting of sanctions on Russia.

The Ukrainians will get their Leopards – maybe after Sunday’s Franco-German summit. Whether this will be in time for a spring offensive or counteroffensive is another matter but the symbolism will allow for some mutual back-patting.

There has been far too much of this for far too long. NATO’s European arm was supposed to have learned bitter lessons from the 2011 Libyan intervention, which saw shortages of aircraft, personnel, weapons and munitions, and the early withdrawal of French and Italian carriers. In the same year, a reform of the German armed forces cut staffing and equipment budgets. But, despite the obsessive focus on NATO spending totals (the infamous 2% of GDP Donald Trump always took for a club fee) the bigger issue in Europe has long been the quality of spending and the willingness to fight.

A perfect illustration is what happened after the Spanish government pledged some of its 200-strong Leopard fleet to the Ukrainians last spring. Bought as part of a worldwide Leopard firesale (one reason this Krauss-Maffei Wegmann tank is the dominant European MBT) for around €2 billion in 1998, the Spanish soon found they had too many. Those mass land battles with Portugal and France never happened. So, in 2012, they put 53 of these beauties into storage in Zaragoza. Ten years later, inspectors checked the MBTs in readiness for transfer to Ukraine and found they were all unusable – even by famously improvisatory Ukrainian engineers.

The Ukraine war may have uprooted European strategic thinking but the non-US arm of the alliance is still playing soldiers. And time is running out.  

Czech mate

Next weekend’s presidential election runoff should reinforce the alliance against Russia and provide another sign that the wave of populist chauvinism is waning.  

The second round pits Andrej Babiš, a billionaire former prime minister with two daily newspapers and a radio station, against Petr Pavel, a former chief of the Czech armed forces and chairman of NATO’s military committee.

Pavel beat Babiš by a hair - 35.40% to 34.99% - in the first round last weekend but the cards are stacked in his favour for the runoff. He is more likely to attract the voters for the six eliminated candidates – especially those from third-placed Danuše Nerudová (13.9%) who endorsed the general and described Babiš as “a great evil”. Pavel needs just half of the voters who chose his three new backers.

The Czech presidency has minimal executive authority but appoints prime ministers and central bank governors, nominates judges for the constitutional court and is commander in chief. Almost as important, the president has a pulpit. Miloš Zeman, the outgoing president, wanted Czechs to look east to Moscow and Beijing and sought to ally with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán. Babiš shares his view.

Like the centre-right cabinet, Pavel supports Ukraine’s fight and has floated the possibility of withdrawing the Czech Republic from the Visegrád Group – an alliance with Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia – due to differences in values. Next stop the Polish parliamentary election.