BERLIN – Olaf Scholz really, really does not want to send Ukraine battle tanks. That is the essence of Germany’s policy on arms exports, once you prune back the limp excuses. One of the more recent ones was for Berlin to insist that it would only send its Leopard 2 tanks, or approve their export by European partners such as Poland, if the US sent tanks of its own.
A new excuse dropped earlier today (20 January) at the summit of Kyiv’s allies at the American air force base in Ramstein, in western Germany. Boris Pistorius, Scholz’s new defence minister, told reporters that no decision had been made on sending the Leopards but that the government would begin cataloguing its stocks of them. Tempting though it is to be drawn into the conundrum of why it took the German government 11 months of full-scale war in Europe to begin this exercise, the simple reality is that Berlin is consciously and deliberately stalling.
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