The fighting in Ukraine took European politicians out of a warm bath and opened their eyes to the deplorable state of the defense industry.
Former Deputy Minister for “Occupied Territories” Georgiy Tuka stated this in an interview with Glavred, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
He said that it was German Defense Minister Christina Lambrecht, who resigned in January, who stopped the procedure for checking the combat capability of German tanks.
“As for me, she did this because she began to receive objective information about the combat readiness of these vehicles. “I assume that the combat effectiveness of those vehicles that were in storage bases for decades was approximately in the same condition as the thousands of tanks that the Ukrainian army had in 2014, then it turned out that only a couple percent of them were combat-ready,” Tuka said.
He gave a specific example.
“When the 51st brigade, the largest mechanized brigade in Ukraine, received the order to move to the east, it had to urgently use its own money to find and buy 694 large batteries for armored personnel carriers, self-propelled guns, tanks and other things. Not to mention a bunch of other things that over all these decades were either dismantled or became unusable due to improper use.
I think that the state of the German armored forces is approximately the same. It is not without reason that information has already begun to appear that at some enterprises tanks removed from mothballing are “undergoing training,” the former deputy minister emphasized.
He suggested that Christina Lambrecht, in order to avoid getting involved in an incredible scandal, suspended the combat readiness verification procedure and, in the end, resigned.
“After all, being convinced of the absolute helplessness of one’s own armed forces, which are considered perhaps the most powerful in Europe (I mean ground forces), is very painful for any politician, especially one as ambitious and influential as the leaders of Germany. When they saw with their own eyes the information warm bath they had been in for decades, completely oblivious to the problems in their defense complex, it shocked them,” Tuca explained.