On that subject:
It “wouldn’t be appropriate” for Western allies to fulfill all of Ukraine’s requests for weaponry, the British prime minister said Friday.
Boris Johnson was speaking at a joint press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz following their first in-person meeting in London, hours after Berlin declined to send Marder tanks to Ukraine, arguing that Germany needs them for its own defense needs.
The U.K. will send over £100 million worth of military equipment to Ukraine, including more Starstreak anti-aircraft missiles, and an extra 800 anti-tank missiles and precision munitions “capable of lingering in the sky until directed to their target,” Johnson announced. The new British package also includes helmets, night-vision devices and body armor.
However, Johnson said the West will not be able to meet all of the weaponry requests submitted by Ukraine, because it “wouldn’t be appropriate” to supply some of that equipment to Kyiv.
Quite frankly, I don't think Marders, Warriors or anything of the like would be particularly useful to Ukraine right now. Crews fully trained on T-tanks and BMPs could probably be retrained on their new mounts in a crash-course. But what of the whole logistical megillah?
That would take months rather than weeks. It'd take large stocks of wear and spare parts, along with fully-outfitted repair shops and technical documentation; it'd take technicians capable of completely dis- and reassembling the vehicles to find and fix any defects.
Without that, such a delivery would only result in one thing: that the abandoned Russian vehicles dotting Ukraine's countryside receive company in the form of abandoned Ukrainian vehicles of Western provenance. The Ukrainians need equipment they can use with little preparation.
I put it to you that in the short term, it'd be more sensible for Britain and Germany to pay countries like Czechia to hand over their equipment of Soviet make to Ukraine, so they can more quickly replace their depleted stocks in whichever way they see fit.
Mind you, the argument that the shrunken armies of Western Europe must also retain defence material for themselves is no pretext. But countries like Poland or Czechia will feel even less inclined to empty their stocks and get caught in the open with their pants down.
What I don't buy is this feeble distinction between "defensive" and "offensive" armaments, or the argument that it wouldn't be "appropriate" to supply Ukraine with tanks; every weapon system has an offensive capacity. More than anything else, we have to stop caring about Russia's propaganda machine. The Russians are perfectly capable of fabricating pretexts no matter how hard we try not to give them any.
I must repeat the same question I asked weeks ago when the plan hatched by Poland and the EU to send MiGs to Ukraine was meet with criticism: How could the supplying of infantry fighting vehicles possibly cross the line when the supplying of anti-tank weapons – which have been responsible for hundreds of Russian vehicles lost – didn't? Strictly speaking, NATO has done more than enough to give Russia a casus belli.