Weapons deliveries too hesitant
Hofreiter warns of “de facto Third World War”
4/20/2022 10:03 am
The federal government is still struggling with the delivery of heavy weapons to Ukraine. Green politician Anton Hofreiter considers this to be dangerous: This will prolong the war and could lead to other countries being attacked.
The Greens European politician Anton Hofreiter has accused the federal government of risking a world war-like expansion of the conflict with its reluctance to deliver arms to Ukraine. The problem with Germany’s attitude is “that we are slowing down the sanctions and arms deliveries, and there is a risk that the war will drag on for ever longer,” Hofreiter told ZDF’s “Morgenmagazin”. And the longer the war drags on, the greater the danger “that other countries will be attacked and we will then slide into an extended de facto Third World War”.
Hofreiter rejected the argument put forward by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, among others, that Germany’s ability to supply weapons was limited because the Ukrainian army was not trained in modern weapon systems. “I find it a bit paternalistic to tell the Ukrainian military you can’t handle it,” Hofreiter said. The Ukrainian army put up “heroic resistance”.
Hofreiter again demands a quick delivery of tanks to Ukraine. “Rheinmetall itself says that they have a whole range of Marder tanks that could be delivered in a very short time,” says the Green politician on ZDF. One possibility is, for example, to deliver tanks that Germany does not urgently need at the moment to Ukraine and then to replace them with new tanks from the Rheinmetall armaments group.
Hofreiter described the German government’s considerations as “good” that Eastern European countries should deliver familiar weapon systems of Russian and Soviet design to the Ukraine and Germany then fill the resulting gaps with modern material. At the same time, however, Ukrainian forces must be trained on modern equipment for the time “when the Russian and Soviet material has been shot to pieces”.