The tanks promised by the West will not help Ukraine win the confrontation with Russia, but they open a window of opportunity to obtain aircraft.
Ukrainian military expert Taras Chmut stated this on DW TV channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to Chmut, tanks of different modifications from different manufacturers will not arrive in Ukraine immediately, but over an extended period of time.
“Receiving Western, specifically Western, not Soviet, not post-Soviet tanks, was one of the stages of increasing and expanding Western assistance to, on the one hand, stop a possible Russian offensive, and on the other, to launch a Ukrainian counter-offensive.
We have been pressing this topic since spring and summer, and finally, at the end of last year it was almost pushed through at the political level, and at the beginning of this year a number of countries voiced their readiness to provide Western tanks. Not new - from the 80s-90s, different quantities, different versions, in different conditions, with different timings of receipt,” the expert said.
“That is, some may be received as soon as a year later, some at the end of this year, some in a few months, but this story opens the way for us to a new type of equipment that we have not received before, namely tanks.
Obviously, we won’t win the war with tanks, but they will help us with this. Plus, having checked the tanks, we can move on to the next one. Next is aviation. We have been talking about it for a long time, and now we are talking more often, louder, and this is a much more strategic type of weapon that can have a much greater impact on the course of the war than tanks,” Chmut said.