While the first Leopard battle tanks from Poland have already been delivered to Ukraine, Kiev – despite an accelerated procedure – will have to wait even longer for the American M1 Abrams main battle tanks.
Washington said on Tuesday that the promised tanks could be shipped by the fall. However, it is the M1A1 variant rather than the newer M1A2 variant. In this way, delivery times could be significantly reduced, said Department of Defense spokesman Pat Ryder.
Biden administration with a very vague timetable
When asked what the timeline would have been different, Ryder said the government was not initially committed to a timetable, expressing only that it would likely take more than a year to make the tanks available to Ukraine.
At the end of January, after much back-and-forth and parallel to the German deployment of Leopard tanks to Kiev, the US government announced that Ukraine would receive 31 M1 main battle tanks. Abrams deliver. However, Washington already stressed that it would take “many months” for these to arrive in Ukraine. The US government had previously argued that it considered the deployment of this main battle tank unwise for various practical reasons. In the end, however, Washington surprisingly swung around.
Source: Krone
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