Post a Comment Print Share on Facebook

Hardly any new aid for Kyiv – Germany's hesitancy particularly stands out

The financial and military aid commitments for Ukraine fell again significantly in July.

- 7 reads.

Hardly any new aid for Kyiv – Germany's hesitancy particularly stands out

The financial and military aid commitments for Ukraine fell again significantly in July. From the six largest European countries Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy and Spain there were hardly any new announcements of military or financial aid packages in the past month. This emerges from the Ukraine Support Tracker, which the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW) publishes monthly.

"However, the gap between promised support and support actually provided is narrowing," say the IfW experts. The aid that was announced in May and June has now been delivered – for example the first three of a total of 15 promised Gepard anti-aircraft tanks from Germany, which arrived in Ukraine at the end of July.

"In July, the donor countries mainly delivered what they had promised and launched few initiatives for new aid," says Christoph Trebesch, head of the team that is creating the Ukraine Support Tracker. The IfW has been collecting data from more than 40 countries since the beginning of the war. In the period from July 2nd to August 3rd, which is now also included, new support commitments worth 1.5 billion euros were added worldwide, most of them from the USA, as in previous months.

The United States is likely to remain by far the largest supporter of Ukraine in the next IfW window. In the second week of August, which is not yet included in the current statistics, Washington put together the largest-ever package of military aid worth around one billion dollars for Kyiv.

According to the Pentagon, the package includes additional ammunition for the Himars and Nasams rocket launcher systems and 1,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles. There are also 50 armored medical treatment vehicles and medical material.

The supplies come entirely from US Army stocks. All in all, the aid from the USA adds up to around 9.8 billion dollars.

Germany, on the other hand, continues to hold back when it comes to the delivery of heavy weapons in particular, but, as in the past few months, is more limited to announcements.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at a press conference in the middle of last week: Germany has broken with a tradition and is supplying weapons to a war zone - and: "We will continue to do so in the near future."

Concrete promises did not follow, however, which caused criticism, among others, from the chairwoman of the Defense Committee of the Bundestag, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (FDP). She is in favor of making Marder infantry fighting vehicles, Fuchs armored personnel carriers and Leopard main battle tanks available to Ukraine.

Dozens of such vehicles are unused in warehouses of German armaments companies. But the Greens and SPD seem to have little support for this.

At a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee in June, Scholz is said to have rejected a possible delivery of Marder armored personnel carriers to Ukraine as a "terrible escalation". In Eastern Europe, concerns appear to be less severe.

A few days ago, Slovakia announced that it would hand over all of its own MIG-29 combat aircraft to Ukraine. Latvia provided six more howitzers earlier this week, and Poland has delivered around 300 main battle tanks.

As WELT AM SONNTAG reported at the end of July, Berlin is also delaying the delivery of purely defensive weapons. Ukraine wants to buy eleven Iris-T SLM air defense systems in Germany. According to the report, the application for this was approved by the Federal Ministry of Economics. Three weeks later, the Federal Security Council, which is headed by Olaf Scholz, still hadn't made the commitment.

If you look at the value of all aid commitments in relation to gross domestic product (GDP), Germany is not even in the top ten. For the period from January 24 to August 3, the IfW examined the level of support, including EU aid, for which the member states are responsible.

In the top places are Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Lithuania and Norway, whose aid to Ukraine accounts for 0.35 to 0.9 percent of economic output. Germany ranks 17th, right behind Spain and just ahead of the small EU states Slovenia and Croatia.

"Everything on shares" is the daily stock exchange shot from the WELT business editorial team. Every morning from 7 a.m. with the financial journalists from WELT. For stock market experts and beginners. Subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music and Deezer. Or directly via RSS feed.

Avatar
Your Name
Post a Comment
Characters Left:
Your comment has been forwarded to the administrator for approval.×
Warning! Will constitute a criminal offense, illegal, threatening, offensive, insulting and swearing, derogatory, defamatory, vulgar, pornographic, indecent, personality rights, damaging or similar nature in the nature of all kinds of financial content, legal, criminal and administrative responsibility for the content of the sender member / members are belong.