At the same time, according to the Director General of the Russian Council for International Affairs Andrey Kortunov, it is possible to reduce military assistance to Kiev MOSCOW, January 21.
/tass/. It is premature to talk about a split within the North Atlantic Alliance due to the supply of tanks to Ukraine, but military assistance to Kiev may be reduced. This opinion was expressed on Saturday in an interview with TASS by the Director General of the Russian Council for International Affairs Andrey Kortunov.
According to Kortunov, there is nothing new in the disagreements within NATO, since the very beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, there have been very different points of view among its members regarding the further actions of the West. Therefore, the analyst continued, the fact that the UK supplies Challenger 2 tanks to Kiev, and Germany has so far refrained from supplying Leopard 2 tanks, is not surprising. "However, many experts believed that at the last meeting at the American Ramstein airbase, Germany's hands would be twisted, forced to make this decision on the supply of tanks, and this did not happen. But this does not mean that the pressure on Berlin will stop. This arm-twisting will continue, and sooner or later Germany's objections will be overcome," the expert believes.
"Therefore, it is premature to talk about a split within the alliance. It may arise if the Republicans, who now have a majority in the House of Representatives of the US Congress, begin to demand a serious and even radical redistribution of the burden of military assistance to Ukraine. They, at least some of the Republicans, have such a position that America invests too much and Europe invests too little. And, of course, everyone points to Germany, although this also applies to other European partners of the United States. Therefore, I admit that serious friction may arise here, provoked not by the European, but by the American side," the analyst said. Kortunov also noted that meetings in the "Ramstein format" are held frequently and at the next meeting, an attempt will probably be made again to put pressure on Berlin if some decision is not taken unilaterally before that.
Nevertheless, the expert did not rule out that military assistance to Ukraine from Western countries may decrease, but this may happen for other reasons. "Now, in fact, there are no Soviet weapons left in the countries of the alliance. Everything that was accumulated there has almost already gone. And, of course, now there is the question of the limits of escalation. And here, firstly, there are physical limitations. Take the same Germany. How many combat-ready tanks do they have now? Apparently, a little more than a hundred. According to some estimates, Ukraine is losing about 300 tanks a month. In the UK, too, the number of Challenger is quite limited," he said.
"In general, there was such a presumption in Europe that tank wars are a thing of the past, so we need to invest seriously in the production of tanks. Therefore, some physical limitations can simply be revealed here, not to mention the existing financial problems. I don't think that something will change fundamentally in the near future, but the fact that all countries have their own limits and limiters is obvious," the agency interlocutor concluded.
On January 20, a regular meeting of defense ministers of about 50 countries was held at the American Ramstein airbase in Germany, where further assistance to Kiev was discussed. According to its results, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said on the Phoenix TV channel that the participants had not yet made any decision on the supply of German Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.
