Germany has provided Ukraine with dozens of armored personnel carriers that are unfit for battlefield service, Bild has reported. The media outlet also claims that Berlin paid way over the odds for the military vehicles.
The German Defense Ministry confirmed last June that it was going to supply 66 FFG “protected infantry combat vehicles” to Ukraine. Since October, Kiev has received 48 units, Bild reported.
However, the vehicles have fallen far short of expectations, as their weak armor makes them unusable anywhere near the front line, the outlet claimed. The vehicles lack mine and shrapnel protection, and offer protection only against small arms fire, an anonymous representative of the Defense Ministry confirmed to reporters.
German military sources told Bild that “enhanced protection against mines was not required by Ukraine at that point in time.”
However, an unnamed government official contradicted these claims, stating that the FFGs were actually meant to be equipped with mine protection. An anonymous senior Ukrainian official also told the outlet that, while Kiev “would of course have liked to receive mine-protected vehicles,” these were “not available on the part of the Germans.” The source added that the Ukrainian military had been forced to assign the personnel carriers to tasks carried out away from the front line.
The procurement process in respect of the hardware also involved multiple middlemen, and the vehicles were not actually manufactured in Germany, but in the United Arab Emirates.
Bild claimed that a single FFG vehicle of this type goes for anywhere between €185,000 and €208,000 ($199,000 and $224,000). However, documents seen by its journalists show that Berlin had to shell out as much as €600,000 for each FFG personnel carrier, totaling €40 million for the entire batch.
Last month, German Green Party MP Sebastian Schafer told DPA news agency that very few of the Leopard 2A6 battle tanks provided to Kiev by Berlin last year remained in service.
Last September, Danish channel TV 2, citing a written briefing by Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen, reported that 12 out of the 20 older Leopard 1 battle tanks supplied by Copenhagen to Kiev were faulty to some extent.
Around the same time, Germany’s Der Spiegel claimed that Ukraine had rejected a batch of ten Leopard 1s provided by Berlin due to their poor condition.