![]() ![]() ![]() “We are cooperating and we are doing it together with our allies, and we are never doing something by ourselves alone,” Mr. “Leadership is about taking the right decisions and to be very strong. “Leadership does not mean you do what people ask you,” he said. Pressed on that question in the interview with The Times, Mr. “What is Berlin afraid of that Kyiv is not?” ![]() “Not a single rational argument on why these weapons can not be supplied, only abstract fears and excuses,” Mr. Commanders along the front say the Germans’ reluctance to provide battle tanks points to a policy of seeking a negotiated settlement along existing lines, rather than a Ukrainian success in pushing out the Russians. Scholz’s refusal - which goes against the will of many even inside his own governing coalition - has earned him noisy and near-unanimous criticism among Germany’s Eastern European neighbors, not least in Ukraine. As they pivot from a defensive posture to an offensive one in the south, Ukrainian forces need tanks to break through defensive lines and recapture more territory before winter and, as Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, put it, “liberate people and save them from genocide.” ![]() Scholz has refused to provide Ukraine with Leopard battle tanks or Marder infantry fighting vehicles, which Ukrainian officials have repeatedly asked for. Arming Ukraine : The Russian strikes brought new pledges from the West to send in more arms to Ukraine, especially sophisticated air-defense systems. But Kyiv also needs the Russian-style weapons that its military is trained to use, and the global supply of them is running low.īut Mr.Putin appears to be responding to his critics at home, momentarily quieting the clamors of hard-liners furious with the Russian military’s humiliating setbacks on the battlefield. Pressure on Putin : With his strikes on civilian targets in Ukraine, Mr.The bridge, which links the Crimean Peninsula to Russia, is a primary supply route for Russian troops fighting in the south of Ukraine. Putin said that the strikes were retaliation for a blast that hit a key Russian bridge over the weekend. Putin of Russia unleashed a series of missile strikes that hit at least 10 cities across Ukraine, including Kyiv, in a broad aerial assault against civilians and critical infrastructure that drew international condemnation and calls for de-escalation. A Large-Scale Strike: President Vladimir V.Germany, he said, was “really doing a lot.” “We changed that, and since then, we delivered a huge mass of very effective weapons to the Ukrainians,” he said. It was a revolution in a country, now Europe’s biggest democracy, whose Nazi past had long made it reluctant to invest in military power, something Mr. Scholz, a former finance minister with little foreign or defense policy experience, won widespread applause when he announced a rearmament program worth around $100 billion and overturned a ban on arms exports to conflict zones, breaking with decades of German pacifism. In the early days after Russia’s attack on Ukraine on Feb. Putin of Russia last week announced a mobilization of roughly 300,000 reservists and his intentions to annex parts of eastern Ukraine, and after he implicitly threatened the use of tactical nuclear weapons, worries about a direct Russia-NATO clash have begun to rise among Kyiv’s Western backers, making it harder to reconcile the twin goals of avoiding such a confrontation and continuing to strengthen Ukraine’s hand in the battlefield. Scholz is not the only one concerned about the danger of escalation. ![]()
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