For the past several days the focus of war news has been squarely on Germany’s Olaf Scholz. The chancellor has been battling with his conscience over whether to accede to Volodymyr Zelensky’s plea to supply Ukraine with his country’s fearsome Leopard 2 tanks.
The Ukrainian president has been hammering the message that with much of the fighting in the east of the country bogged down in a bloody and attritional battle around the city of Bakhmut in the eastern Donbas region while Russia is reportedly conscripting and training up hundreds of thousands more troops for a spring offensive, his country is desperate for the sort of increased firepower these tanks can provide.
Zelensky has been putting similar pressure on Joe Biden too. Washington has been reluctant to supply Kyiv with its Abrams 1 tanks, which have led American battle assaults since they were first deployed in 1991, insisting they were too complicated and too hard to maintain and repair.
