The "lack of transparency", as denounced by the Popular Party, with which the Ministry of Defense has managed the shipment of weapons dragged its head, Margarita Robles, yesterday to the Congress of Deputies to shed light on the donations that Spain has done in the last 12 months. The popular ones, who continued to show their outstretched hand to the Government in Defense matters, demanded from the minister a "radical change" in the information policy to "do pedagogy" and not give "wings to the detractors of the defense."
Robles, who went up to the rostrum twice during the interpellation, did not commit himself to anything. The Minister of Defense hid behind "prudence" and "discretion" in order not to report the exact number of war material that has been sent to the Government of Volodimir Zelensky. And that is so, as he assured, because Defense does not want "a person like Putin, who on Monday once again threatened the entire international community in the terms in which he did it, even dropping the possibility of a nuclear bomb, to be able to have the slightest bit of information.
However, immediately afterwards the minister specified that Spain will send, for the moment, six Leopard 2 A4 tanks, which are being rehabilitated at the Santa Bárbara factory in Alcalá de Guadaira (Seville) after years of being stored in Zaragoza in a “unfortunate state”. The forecast with which the department directed by Robles works is that the six Leopards will be ready at the end of March or beginning of April to be integrated into an international battalion that will be deployed on Ukrainian soil. "Always to defend against Russia, never to attack," say ministerial sources. Those dates with which Defense works coincide with the end of the training program that 55 Ukrainian soldiers are studying in Zaragoza.
At the insistence of the Popular Party -and in order not to break the bridges that are built in this matter-, Robles "succinctly" reviewed some of the shipments that Spain has made to date, although he did not reveal any other news of the 54 transports sent to Ukraine (42 by air, nine by land and three by sea): C90 anti-tank rocket launchers, ammunition, machine guns, shells, ammunition for tanks, 105 and 155 mm artillery, an Aspide anti-aircraft battery, missiles and launchers Hawk, Mistral missiles, 105/14 howitzers, a deployable control center for cyber defense operations, twenty TOA armored vehicles, five naval systems...
The minister was much more precise regarding less warlike shipments: ten light vehicles, ten heavy vehicles, four light ambulances and one RG31 armored ambulance, 2,000 tons of diesel fuel, 5,000 bulletproof helmets, vests, gowns, jackets and 77,000 pieces of equipment. of winter. On the humanitarian front, Robles specified that 17 flights have transferred more than 600 vulnerable people to Spain. The majority are cancer patients, although there are also 58 war wounded who are being treated in the military hospitals in Zaragoza and Madrid.
The minister took advantage of the occasion to highlight how the Spanish military has redoubled its presence in countries close to Ukraine and even on the Russian border. Deployments have multiplied in the last year by land, sea and air in countries such as Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania or Bulgaria. Always under the umbrella of NATO. And at this point, he informed the Plenary of Congress that on April 1 a Spanish detachment made up of 80 soldiers will deploy a Nasams battery (advanced anti-aircraft missile system) at the Amari base (Estonia) equipped with six Amraam missiles and a sentinel radar. This mission abroad, according to Defense sources, is carried out at the request of the Estonian government, which has acquired said battery and requires Spanish experience for its use.
The deputy of the Popular Party Adolfo Gutiérrez – a career soldier – demanded from the minister that the dispatch of the next 80 soldiers to Estonia go through the Congress of Deputies, according to what he said, as established by the National Defense law. This norm grants the Lower House the power to authorize the participation of the armed forces in missions abroad. The Defense Minister flatly rejected this requirement, justifying that the new deployment is part of the Air Police operations in the Baltic countries in which Spain has participated since 2004. Last year there were Spanish detachments flying fighters in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania without going through Congress.
