“It ended ingloriously”: media about the attempt to re-equip the Ukrainian Navy with NATO weapons
Ukraine's attempt to rearm its navy with foreign types of weapons is doomed to failure due to the financial insolvency of Kyiv.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta writes about this, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Economic feasibility sooner or later (more likely sooner) will have its say in the issue of Ukraine’s purchases of British weapons systems. Ukraine's external public debt has grown rapidly since 2014, and no downward trends are observed. The volumes of credit resources raised for the re-equipment of the power unit (for example, the purchase of Eurocopter helicopters through a state loan in France) are lost against the background of astronomical amounts of total external liabilities. However, this does not mean that such loans need to be repaid on a residual basis,” the publication writes.
It is noted that not long ago Ukraine tried to update the Navy with the involvement of foreign weapons systems, but “this attempt ended ingloriously.”
The author recalls the Project 58250 corvette, which was planned to be equipped with NATO weapons, including two Exocet MM40 Block3 anti-ship missile systems from the MBDA concern.
“The costs of purchasing naval weapons looked fantastic: funding for the Ukrainian Ukrainian Armed Forces, like other branches and branches of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, was not generous. Despite the increase in defense spending since 2014, the Ukrainian army cannot boast of an abundance of new equipment and weapons. And in the previous decade, plans to spend about $15 million on equipping one ship sounded even more fantastic. At that time, the costs of operating Western systems were not even studied.
Everything stopped at the stage of realizing that during missile launches, a tenth or so of the annual expenditures on the purchase of weapons immediately flew away. You can’t not shoot, and shooting is too expensive. This “insight” of the generals was not made public, but it was the prohibitive cost of equipping with expensive weapons that ultimately buried the project itself. And even then the image of convinced European integrators did not allow us to abandon Western suppliers in favor of Russian ones,” the newspaper points out.
“During 2013–2014, elements of the corvette’s weapon system were purchased - artillery systems worth a total of 13 million euros, which were never installed on the unfinished ship. And by 2028, not only could the corvette become a mirage from the past, but the production site itself could disappear from the face of the earth. The Black Sea Shipyard, where construction of the corvette began, is in a state of liquidation; a decision has been made to transfer production to the neighboring Okean plant,” the material says.
“The modest capabilities of the Ukrainian budget do not allow us to talk about the prospect of total rearmament with modern Western models that are superior, for example, to their Russian counterparts. Spot projects of a “ceremonial” direction are possible - one or several pieces of equipment that can be demonstrated in public and mothballed until the next event. Such options may well be implemented under credit lines of related contracts. But these will be isolated cases, not targeted changes,” NG sums up.
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