German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced yesterday that his country will supply Ukraine with a state-of-the-art anti-aircraft missile defense system and ultra-modern radars, thus intensifying the shipment of weapons while he is being criticized by Kyiv, abroad and by the German conservative opposition for the delay in the delivery of weapons promised weeks ago. "We supplied continuously, since the beginning of the war, and just after the beginning of the war we made this decision and broke with a state practice in Germany for years," Scholz counterattacked in the Bundestag (lower house of Parliament).
The anti-aircraft defense system is of the Iris-T type, the most modern available to Germany, and is capable of "protecting an entire large city from Russian bombing," according to the foreign minister, while the radars will help the Ukrainian army to detect enemy artillery.
In the session, the leader of the Christian Democrat CDU, Friedrich Merz, reproached him for the fact that, more than a month after the Bundestag agreed to provide Ukraine with heavy weapons, the material has not yet reached its destination. In recent days the German press has compared the promises with the actual shipments, and has found that, for example, the fifteen promised Gepard tanks had not left because there was not enough stock of ammunition, and it did not make sense to send them without it.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted some serious shortcomings in the German armed forces (Bundeswehr), for the modernization of which a special fund of 100 billion euros has now been hastily created.
In response to criticism, Scholz said that Germany has already supplied Ukraine with thousands of anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, more than 15 million rounds of ammunition, 100,000 hand grenades, more than 5,000 anti-tank mines, explosives, machine guns, medical supplies and 54 cargo trucks, these in cooperation with Denmark.
Scholz also said that Germany indirectly supplies Ukraine through other European NATO countries. Thus, Greece or the Czech Republic send Soviet-made weapons that they possess – with which Ukrainian soldiers are familiar – and Germany sends Greeks and Czechs German weapons to replace them. But Kyiv and many observers judge that the economic and political power of Germany is not responding to the height of the warlike circumstances.
