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The U.K. has confirmed it will supply Ukraine with British tanks in a move that will put the onus on Germany and other countries to provide more military help for Kyiv in its war with Russia.
The British government formally announced on Saturday, in a decision that had been trailed earlier in the week, that it would deliver Challenger 2 tanks to Kyiv as well as additional artillery systems.
The announcement followed a discussion between British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, with the BBC reporting that the delivery would involve around a dozen tanks. Sunak’s office said that the leaders had “agreed on the need to seize on this moment with an acceleration of global military and diplomatic support” for Kyiv.
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Zelensky tweeted that British support “will not only strengthen us on the battlefield, but also send the right signal to other partners.”
On their own, the tanks are unlikely to be a game changer but the decision by the U.K. to provide the tanks would be significant if other Western countries followed suit. Poland has plans to send 14 of its German-made Leopard tanks to Ukraine as an element in a larger international coalition of aid.
Although Germany is a major provider of support for Ukraine’s war effort, its chancellor Olaf Scholz faces international pressure to supply more military equipment. Earlier this month, it joined France in agreeing to send armored fighting vehicles to Ukraine.
Built in the late 1990s, the Challenger 2 is more modern, has better protection and is more accurate than the mostly Soviet-era tanks that Ukraine currently uses.
The U.S. also announced last week it would supply Ukraine with Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, artillery systems, armored personnel carriers and surface-to-air missiles as part of its latest military aid package.
Glen Grant, a military analyst with the Baltic Security Foundation who has seen the tanks during drills in the U.K., said the Challenger is “frightening because they’re big and the ground rumbles. You can feel it on the ground when they come towards you.”
“In operational terms, this will be a great opportunity to make a real fighting brigade,” he told Newsweek.
“Stick those with the (U.S-supplied) Bradleys and some of the other equipment they’ve got and they could actually make something that can drive on, keep going and frighten people,” he said. “I just hope they don’t get them and then spread them out because that will be that will be wasting the key strength of them.”
However, Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a U.K. think tank, wrote in The Guardian that the Challenger 2 was 20 tonnes heavier than the Soviet-designed tanks Ukraine uses and would strain Ukrainian infrastructure it would need to travel along.
In addition to the training required required to use them, the tanks would need to be “provided alongside combat engineering and mobility support vehicles if they were to be employable at any scale,” Watling added.
