Re those Challenger tanks - accounting shenanigans and political optics appear to be the main motivations - see the penultimate paragraph below.
From the New European (the story is further down the page)
Elsewhere in this edition of the New European, my colleague Paul Mason makes a persuasive case for the symbolism of sending 14 British Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine. Yet my mates in the military remain dubious about the armoured fighting vehicles, and even the gung-ho, Britain-is-best Daily Express has hired Lt Col Stuart Crawford to predict that Rishi Sunak’s much-trumpeted plan is going to be “more trouble than it’s worth”.
My sources say the problem with the Challengers is they are heavy and there is little Ukrainian infrastructure along which they can be deployed in most of the Donbas region. Another significant problem – compounded by the current supply chain issues – is obtaining the parts needed to keep them going.
As I reported in April last year when Johnson started banging on about these tanks, the army had been looking forward to replacing these old bangers with 250 of America’s SEPv3 version of its Abrams M1A2 MBTs, the most modern tank in the US inventory.
It has been suggested that this latest move is of more use to Sunak’s spinmeisters and the government’s accountants than to Ukraine. The MoD can charge the Foreign Office the full commercial price for the tanks – no one else would be willing to pay that – and the FCO can, in turn, set the expenditure against the UK’s foreign aid budget.
Of the Challenger 2s, Penny Mordaunt, as defence secretary, was honest enough to concede in 2019 that they were even then “obsolete”.
Wikpedia says that the British Army has 227 operational Challenger 2s. The official plan is to upgrade 148 Challenger 2s to Challenger 3 and withdraw the rest, so in theory up to 79 tanks could be given to Ukraine without affecting the upgrade plan.
I’ve seen speculation on Twitter that the UK might buy back Challenger 1 tanks that were sold to Jordan. The Jordanian army upgraded its Challenger 1 tanks under the name Al-Hussein, and has 190 in service and 270 in storage.
The unit told Insider the video was taken on December 28 last year near the village of Verkhnekamianske in the Luhansk Oblast in eastern Ukraine.
Oh dear. I hope this was just an accident, and not Russian action.
The current opinion is that the helicopters carrying ministers/politicians are forced to fly extremely low to avoid any Russian action and that the weather conditions may have contributed.
It seems at least 3 children were also killed as a result of the crash.
The head of the Russian private mercenary group, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has criticised the Kremlin administration for failing to block YouTube.
The US-owned video platform is the “information plague of our time”, Prigozhin posted to Telegram. He alleged, without proving any evidence, that 40% of the videos on the platform were “politicised and directed against Russia”.
He went on to say that there were two reasons why YouTube had not been banned in Russia: that it was supposedly indispensable for ordinary citizens and, primarily, the opposition of President Vladimir Putin’s administration.
Prigozhin said:
Those who are against the closure of YouTube are, in my opinion, people who are traitors to their people and their country, traitors to previous and future generations of Russians. They live abroad, take holidays abroad, raise children abroad, proclaim high values but, nevertheless, support the West in every possible way and feed on it.
By the way, Prigozhin has a sideline in films about heroic Russian mercenaries.
It’s a relatively safe way for him (and by extension the warlord faction) to undermine Putin, because he poses the West as the real threat. Still, if he keeps this up Putin will find a way to season his meal with polonium.
Whether it was a direct action, it’s still very much Russia’s fault.
In many ways, Olaf Scholz isn’t really suited for the role of chancellor, being very much the anti-Boris Johnson. Olaf is more the sort of politician who prefers to arrange things and let others take credit. Which can be an asset, but it does make for maddening political theater as the chancellor is expected to be in the limelight.
I personally feel that the tanks are being quietly prepared, but applying pressure only makes the German chancellor even more tight-lipped than before, because if there is one thing he hates, it’s being forced to react instead of working at his own careful pace and not be sloppy, as badly written legislation can be worse than doing nothing, as seen by how Jens Spahn handled the Covid crisis.
EDIT: and now the shoe has been dropped, Chancellor Scholz has announced that Germany will supply Leopard II tanks, but only if the USA also donates Abrams as well. This fits with my view of Scholz being allergic to both taking the lead, and allergic to any appearance that he can be influenced.
I think an undercooked part of Olaf Scholz’ character is that he is under suspicion of selling out to lobbyists, bankers, and so on. The whole Cum Ex affair is fueled by his silence on whether he had meetings with the criminal banks or not. But the other side is the leaked Uber docs, where they belittled him for agreeing to meet, but not actually willing to give them more than the concession that taxis no longer need to be a certain beige colour.
I think the Stryker is a great tool for scout companies, but on the other hand my experiences as armored recon are from the pre-drone era. But it’s robust, it’s more agile than the Bradley is, and its main gun can fend off most attackers. I also suspect it will be more valuable than the Bradley when Mud Season goes back into full swing.
If there’s one thing that would bring me round to Scholz’s position on German export of heavy armour, it’s the UK demanding the opposite
