Sending more western tanks to support Ukraine does not mean, as some politicians occasionally come dangerously close to implying, that the war is now almost over – save only for the fighting. The Ukraine war will still last months, if not years, and today’s decisions are more of a strategic body swerve than a complete and fully executed U-turn. Nevertheless, this is an unmistakably big moment, and for three main reasons.
The first is that battle tanks give Ukraine a military advantage that, in the words of Ed Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute, could be transformative. The three types of western battle tank now being committed to Ukraine – the US’s M1 Abrams, Germany’s Leopard 2 and the UK’s Challenger 2 – are all significantly more powerful than the Soviet-era T-72s that form the bulk of the Russian and Ukrainian tank forces. The same goes for the French Leclerc tanks, whose dispatch to Ukraine has not been ruled out either.
