The Decibel - Western allies debate sending tanks to Ukraine

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Ukraine wants tanks – 300 of them to be precise. President Volodymyr Zelensky believes that western battle tanks could be the key to driving Russian troops out of his country. But the allies, including Canada, are still deliberating on whether they should send them.Steven Chase has been covering the developments on this aspect of the war for The Globe. He explains why Canada alone can’t make the decision to send Ukraine our Leopard-2 tanks and why allies are worried this might be the escalation that provokes a Russian backlash.Questions? Comments? Ideas? E-mail us at [e-mail]

The Kremlin must lose. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke to his country's allies last week. He's been pushing them to give Ukraine a major tool to use on the battlefield against Russia. Tanks. And I can thank you hundreds of times. And it will be absolutely just and fair given all that we have already done. Canada and other allies have the tanks that Zelensky wants, but the decision to give them to Ukraine isn't so simple.

So Zelensky has been amping up the pressure. But hundreds of thank you are not hundreds of tanks. Stephen Chase joins us today. He's the Globe's senior parliamentary reporter, and he'll take us through the politics of gifting Ukraine battle tanks. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Steve, thank you so much for talking to me today. Oh, you're welcome. Glad to be here. It feels like every few months now we're talking about a new military request that Ukraine is asking for, right?

First, it was a no-fly zone back last spring. Then it was air defense systems. And now it's tanks. Steve, does it surprise you at all that we're talking about tanks at this stage? Well, it's been a gradual escalation on Ukraine's part that over the course of the last 11 months, the scale of weaponry, the sophistication of the weaponry that Ukraine has asked for and that we've delivered, it outweighs what we thought we'd be doing at the front of the war. And that is because we have become more confident, both in Ukraine's ability to use those weapons effectively,

but also that there's no backlash from the Russians. Okay. Why does Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, why does he say he needs tanks specifically? Well, part of it's the timing and where we are in the war. successfully pushed the Russians back to eastern Ukraine and held that line and even pushed that line further back in the last few months in a way that nobody thought was possible. But what is happening, meanwhile, in Russia is they are regrouping, recruiting, and sort of restaffing their front lines. And we expect there's going to be a spring offensive by the Russians to start pushing back. So in the last few months, the Russians have started to dig in. They're building obstacles.

They are fortifying. They are essentially bunkering down. So Ukraine and Russia are getting ready for a grinding conflict in eastern Ukraine. And the tanks are the only thing on the ground that have the power to punch through that line. Mr. Zelensky says he needs 300 of them. He has said, give me the tanks and I can finally finish this. So Ukraine specifically is asking for tanks that are called Leopards. There's the Leopard 1, there's the Leopard 2. What are these tanks, Steve? What do they look like? What do they do? These are massive machines. They are the most powerful, mobile, truly mobile aspect of any

European army and of course, of the Canadian army too. Think of them, they're like 25 to 30 feet long, 12 feet wide. They weigh like, I don't know, 64,000 kilograms. So they're massive. And they have a 120 millimeter gun or a cannon on them. So that shoots massive shells. For comparison, of course, think of a firearm, a handgun that shoots nine millimeter shells. They can wreck damage and destruction on a scale

that nothing else can. So they're the tip of the most powerful spear in the land arsenal. Okay. And I guess for people like me who haven't actually seen a tank, like if we're comparing that to a truck or an SUV, like how big is that if I'm trying to visualize it? Well, it's like the biggest SUV you've ever seen. And it has tracks, which means it has wheels that then have a tracked mechanism that allows it to go pretty much across anything. It can climb steps. It can go over bumpy fields.

It can go up hills, go through mud. So it's a mobile war platform that can go through anything. Wow. And so I guess tactically speaking, you say they can go through anything, but like on the battlefield. So what are they capable of doing in this kind of environment? What they can do is they can punch through an enemy's defenses that is break through the front line, and particularly when the enemy has built up fortifications and obstacles and gullies or trenches and so on. These, again, are leopard tanks. This is the name of this kind of tank. Why is it the leopard tanks in particular that Ukraine is asking for?

Well, Ukraine has seized on that because they're in large supply in Europe, particularly. Like what happened in the earlier part of the war was that Ukraine had its own tanks, but these were Soviet era and Soviet design tanks. And so for instance, the Ukrainians would be familiar with using those and they've used many of those up

and other former Soviet bloc countries have also donated their Soviet era tanks. What remains now is what we would call Western tanks. These are tanks made by Germany, and they were made all throughout the Cold War. I believe there are about 2,000 Leopard tanks sitting in warehouses across Europe right now. So Mr. Zelensky is simply picking the most readily available armament and asking for that. And so the idea is he's asking a bunch of countries. So if each country can give a few dozen tanks, essentially, he can get enough to make a difference. Is that the idea? Yes.

Is there something different from this ask, asking for tanks, compared to other weapons requests that Ukraine has made up until this point? Yes. This is the heaviest equipment that Ukraine has asked for. There was an initial request for Ukraine, for NATO member countries, to police the skies over Ukraine, to create a space there that would discourage the Russians from attacking. That was like the no-fly zone we kept hearing about for months there. Exactly. And NATO didn't agree to that because they rightly thought that would drag them into the war and suddenly we'd be at war with Russia as well. But after that, we began equipping Ukraine and all other NATO countries began equipping Ukraine, starting with the smallest stuff. It was a lot of the material you need for what's called asymmetric warfare for when you're basically acting like insurgents.

And steadily over the last 11 months, we've been ramping up the power and the sophistication of the weaponry. Let's get into a bit of the details here, Steve. Ukraine is asking Canada for tanks. You said Ukraine is asking for 300 tanks from all of the NATO allies. But for Canada specifically, what tanks do we have? How many are available here that we could potentially give to Ukraine? That's a good question. We have an answer on paper from the Department of National Defense. They say that they have about 92 Leopard tanks. But former senior military officers have cast doubt on that, including retired General Andrew Leslie, who was the head of the Canadian Army. And he says that anecdotally he's been told that we, in fact, only have about 20 to 30 working tanks, and the rest of them are waiting for spare parts or being used for parts.

Is that normal to have like a bunch of – a massive part of our fleet just not functioning at the moment? In my experience, for instance, on paper we would have 60 or 70 fighter jets, but in practice we learn from time to time we only have 30 that fly and the rest are spare parts or can't be cannibalized for spare parts. So, yes, there is a big gap and it's an unhealthy gap for most countries between what we have on paper and what we're able to use. So General Leslie, as I was saying, retired General Leslie had said, you know, we have 20 to 30 tanks. We need those for training. I'm not sure we even have any to send. There has been sort of conflicting opinions given on this one. Another retired General, Rick Hillier, who actually was the Chief of the Defense Staff, he said that, in fact, we don't need the tanks. We can forego training for a while. We

should put together 50 of them, regardless of how many we have available now, and send them over to make a sacrifice for Ukraine, because it's not like we're going to need our tanks in the short term, and we can do without training for a while, and we should order some new ones. So 90 on paper, 20 to 30 in practice. Some people are saying we should forego these and give up what we have, even if it means we can't train in the meantime. And you mentioned General Rick Hillier there. We should also say he's an advisor to the Ukrainian World Congress. So he's heavily involved in the discussions and the ideas around what should be happening here. Yes. And he's obviously, as you said, he's working for the Ukrainians.

Where are these tanks that we've got, Steve? Where are they located? Yeah, the tanks are spread out in three locations, in Edmonton, in Geyshtown, New Brunswick, and in Quebec. So nowhere near Ukraine. Yeah, they probably have to be put on trains and then shipped to a port and then shipped by boat over to Europe. I don't imagine they'd be small enough to fit inside even our heaviest lift airplanes, our Globemasters.

And so for Canada's tanks, who actually gets to decide whether we give Ukraine these tanks? Well, there's two people involved in a sense. There's Canada and the Canadian government has to decide, but ultimately it's up to the Germans because these are German made tanks. And this stems from the fact that all Western countries, when they export weapons, they have a process they go through where they make the customers sign what are called end user agreements. And this is where the customer tells them what they're going to use the tank for, the use to which this weapon will be put. And because exporting tanks to Ukraine is outside of the agreement of that end user

agreement, that means Canada and other countries have to go back to Germany and say, hey, I know I said I was going to use this to defend my own country, but now we'd like to ship them to Ukraine for the defense of their country. And that's what the Germans have to say. We'll be back after this message. So Canada would have bought these tanks from Germany saying, we're going to use these tanks for the defense of Canada, but now because we might be shipping them to Ukraine, we need to go back and check with

Germany. Is that okay if we do that, essentially? Yeah. I mean, we can just ignore this end user agreement and ship them over. But the likelihood is that Germany wouldn't sell us things in the future. Okay. And so what has Canada said on this front? So Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Defense Minister Anita Anand, what have they said about whether Canada will send tanks to Ukraine if Germany gives the green light? Well, the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister have spoken lots of words, but they haven't actually said much. The only thing that's important is that Mr. Trudeau has said we're not there yet with respect to the Leopard tanks. We can't get a good sense of whether Canada has actually formally asked Germany to ship the tanks over. The German embassy doesn't respond to questions about that. So it looks like Canada is waiting to see what the rest of the allies do.

And that, of course, takes us to the debate that's been going on for a few weeks now and reached a bit of a head last week in Germany. Well, what are the other allies saying they're going to do? Like, what are the other various NATO members who've been asked about tanks? Where do they stand on the issue? Well, the Brits have already committed to sending tanks, which are not Leopard tanks, but are British tanks called Challengers, and they've committed to send 14 of them. Poland and Lithuania have been very aggressive and assertive in saying that they want to send their Leopard tanks. And in fact, Poland has even said that we're going to send these tanks whether the Germans

agree or not. Oh, really? And the United States, of course, which is conspicuously absent here, the Germans have said privately to reporters, this has been reported in Reuters and other publications, that, well, we should only be sending Leopard tanks if the Americans are sending their Abram tanks. The Americans haven't committed any tanks. We know the Ukrainian would like them,

and we've not seen any on-the-record explanation of why. We've seen an off-the-record explanation to certain journalistic outlets that the supply lines for these tanks would be too complicated. So many countries met last week in Ramstein, Germany, which, of course, is the largest U.S. air base in Germany. And it was dozens of allies of Ukraine discussing what they're going to do to give them what they need to stop Russian missiles, to give them what they need to have a bit more control over the air. Because as we saw in the fall, the Russians used their missiles very effectively to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure, water, electricity, in an effort to stop the population's will to fight.

So, okay, so when it comes to the tanks, though, here, Steve, it sounds like it's kind of up to Germany now to make a decision or not. What do we know about where Germany stands on this issue? This is complicated because we see – we get snippets, but we don't get a full expository answer. We had the new defense minister of Germany indicate last week that they weren't ready to make a decision yet and that they're still talking. We had the Germans say on background to journalists that this should be done in conjunction with the American sending tanks, which the Americans haven't committed to. And then on the weekend, we had Germans foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, say that they would not stand in the way of the shipment of Leopard tanks. She told French TV, the request for approval has not been asked, but if we were asked, we would not stand in the way. One thing that Germany's hinting at in its comments is they're sort of saying like, don't put this all on us. Not all of the allies have made a decision on this. So

it's a bit unclear as to whether Germany's the only factor here. And can you just remind us, Steve, what would the hesitation be to give the tanks? From Ukrainians' perspective, it sounds like they think they need the war. And this has been a real dilemma for the allies throughout the war is, at what point will we cross a red line and invoke or incite a backlash from the Russians? So far, it hasn't happened. And that's what has made allies more confident, more willing to ramp up the sophistication and power of what they're giving Ukraine. And from everything you're seeing, the people you're talking to, Steve, does it look like Ukraine is going to get tanks from Canada and other allies? I think it's a matter of, you know, the dam bursting. At some point, if a few get sent,

then the others will send them as well. Poland is the most aggressive right now. And I would say that if Poland gets approved, others some sort of decision this week that will enable the tanks to move forward. And then other countries, of course, will feel compelled to step up and support and lend as well. Steve, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today and explain all of this. Oh, you're welcome. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland,

and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.