It took German industry an eyebrow-raising 19 months to refurbish and deliver the first 58 of at least 155 Leopard 1A5 tanks a German-led consortium has pledged to Ukraine. But the three-country consortium—Germany, The Netherlands and Belgium—has apparently resolved parts shortages and is finally picking up the pace.
Since those first 58 Leopard 1A5s arrived through early September, an additional 45 of the 1980s-vintage tanks have shipped.
The difference is that Russia takes them out of storage, and if they can drive, they’re going to the front. Europe completely refurbished the tanks and sent fully operational (if old) main battle tanks to Ukraine.
Yes I know these are supposed to be better. But essentially these were taken out of storage too. And only being able to supply about 2-3% of what Russia is throwing at Ukraine remains unimpressive IMO even if the quality is higher.
Maybe this is not the top priority compared to other weapons, it just seems like we could do a lot more. After almost 3 years of war we should have been able to build better capacity to help Ukraine.
I’m fucking tired of Europe not showing Russia that what they are doing is way beyond unacceptable. We must consider ourselves at war with Russia at this point, with massive Russian hybrid warfare. Countries that can’t get into their heads that the easy way is to supply Ukraine with everything they need, are not paying anything remotely close to due diligence.
This complaint is insane to me.
Russia is a huge country with massive amounts of natural resources that acts as a single political entity.
Europe is not a single political entity. It is made up of a bunch of different nations that all have to provide for their own militaries first and don’t have the same access to natural resources
The only entity this complaint would be valid for is the US.
TL;DR scaling matters, even for countries.
Bullshit, it’s the smaller countries that have given the most relatively, which is completely contradictory to your claim. For instance all the countries that donated F-16 are small countries.
Also this problem is way closer to Europe than to USA. We can’t keep acting like children who can’t do anything ourselves, and always wait for USA to handle our problems. We freaking did that with Yugoslavia too, it’s embarrassing.
It’s great that USA is helping, they are our ally after all, and they have an interest in maintaining stability in Europe, but Europe definitely needs to be the leader and driving force on this issue.
There are many initiatives from EU but not enough, and regarding scale EU is way more powerful than Russia.
None of this about ‘should’.
Take a look at a map sometime. Preferably an equal area projection map.
If Europe was all a single united country with a strong federal system, it still wouldn’t come close to the amount of resources that the US or Russia or China has access too. And if Africa as a continent were to unify into a single country, it would dwarf those three (which is one of the reasons it is the colonial playground of, well, basically everyone.)
And that isn’t what Europe is, is it?
Every political border in Europe is an additional layer of inefficiency. Not that there is anything wrong with that. That is what it means to be your own country and have sovereignty.
I swear, most of the stupid opinions about war, any war, would not be held if the person just looked at a topographical map from time to time.
Land area does not equate to useful resources.
Huh, I guess empires were pointless.