Letter to Minister Lambrecht: Poland asks for "serious" tank offer

Through the media, Poland railed against the exchange of rings and the lack of replacement tanks.

Letter to Minister Lambrecht: Poland asks for "serious" tank offer

Through the media, Poland railed against the exchange of rings and the lack of replacement tanks. Conciliatory tones are now being struck by letter. But the demand from Warsaw basically remains the same.

Poland asks Germany for a better offer for a ring swap of tanks to support Ukraine. Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak wrote a letter to his German colleague Christine Lambrecht, which was published by the Wpolityce portal in Warsaw. He hopes for a "serious offer" that will "contribute significantly to strengthening Polish and regional defense capacities."

The minister wrote that Poland had left Ukraine, which was attacked by Russia, with armaments for almost 1.7 billion euros. These included tanks, armored personnel carriers and other heavy weapons, some of post-Soviet design and some of the most modern, such as the Krab howitzer. "These deliveries have created gaps in our defense capabilities."

Poland was not satisfied with the previous Berlin offer of 20 Leopard 2 tanks with piecemeal delivery from 2023. When dissatisfaction became public in Warsaw, Lambrecht explained again in a letter to Blaszczak how small the German holdings were. She suggested both countries should order new Leopard 2 together. Poland should be given priority in extradition. The "Süddeutsche Zeitung" reported on this letter.

"I would like to emphasize that we do not expect undeserved advantages," replied Blaszczak. It is about "used capacities that are well known to our military and that can be used easily and quickly in the Polish armed forces".

The ring exchange envisages that eastern alliance partners deliver tanks of Soviet design to the Ukraine and receive western makes from Germany, among others, in return. So far, however, this has not worked as quickly as expected.

According to research by the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" (FAS), the idea for the ring exchange with Poland came from the traffic light MPs. Three committee chairmen from the Bundestag, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann from the FDP, Anton Hofreiter from the Greens and Michael Roth from the SPD, were in Warsaw on July 12. There they met the Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk.

At that time, Poland had already begun to deliver hundreds of modernized Soviet-style tanks to Ukraine on its own initiative. The chairmen suggested Szynkowski vel Sęk to ask for a replacement from Germany, as FAS learned. Since then, the federal government and Poland have been arguing about how exactly such a ring exchange could be structured.