Almost exactly two weeks ago, SPIEGEL reported that Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius and Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock have been working on securing additional funding amounting to €3 billion to assist Ukraine.
According to SPIEGEL, the funds would be used to procure urgently needed IRIS-T SLM fire units, Patriot missiles and self-propelled artillery systems for Ukraine, among other things.
Since then, the funding has been the subject of intense debates in Germany. A downright dirty dispute has arisen between the SPD with Chancellor Olaf Scholz and all other democratic parties, as there are ongoing discussions about where the €3 billion should come from.
Now, for the first time, Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius — one of the two initiators of the plan to secure the additional funding — commented publicly on some procurement details mentioned repeatedly as part of the reporting and refuted the claim that three additional IRIS-T SLM fire units would be procured with the funds.
“Firstly, there are no IRIS-T systems in the €3 billion, and secondly, if they were included, they would not be able to accelerate the delivery because the industry can only produce as fast as it produces” Pistorius said today at a joint press conference with the Lithuanian Minister of Defence Dovilė Šakalienė.
In doing so, he also refutes the SPIEGEL claim that these could be delivered at short notice over the summer, thus confirming my own comments on the reporting, which I had made publicly on several occasions.
After all, Germany will be supplying three IRIS-T SLM fire units with an additional six IRIS-T SLS launchers to Ukraine this year anyway. With or without an additional budget. So even if further IRIS-T SLM fire units were financed, they would only be handed over after the originally planned deliveries.
Interesting: SPIEGEL removed the related sentence in their article about the possible delivery over the summer without any reference or comment.
This means that, at least according to the current state of knowledge, Ukraine will not receive any unplanned additional SAM air defence systems from Diehl Defence for now.
He did not comment on other relevant details, such as whether other air defence systems with different capabilities and for other use cases are on his ministry’s “shopping list”.
Nevertheless, since Patriot missiles were also included in the article he has now commented on, and he said nothing about them, it can be assumed that at least these are actually on the list and that Germany is planning further deliveries to Ukraine, which is excellent news.
For now, we have no choice but to wait and see how the negotiations on the additional budget proceed. A decision should be expected by the end of next week at the latest, as the Budget Committee of the Bundestag will then meet for the last time before the upcoming federal elections on the 23rd of February.
But one thing is clear. Everyone agrees that Ukraine urgently needs the military equipment that could be procured with the additional €3 billion.
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