Ukraine reportedly is getting more Leopard 2A4 tanks—from Spain. But don’t expect it to happen fast.
Spanish news site InfoDefensa broke the news on Wednesday. According to the site, Spain’s defense-trade control board has authorized the transfer, to Ukraine, of 20 ex-Spanish army Leopard 2A4s.
If confirmed, the tank pledge would boost to 74 the number of 55-ton, four-person Leopard 2A4s that Ukraine has gotten from its NATO allies. Of those, 40 already have entered service with the Ukrainian army’s 33rd Mechanized Brigade, which has been in combat in southern Ukraine non-stop for nearly a year.
According to Oryx, the brigade has lost at least eight Leopard 2s; another nine have been damaged and at least temporarily abandoned.
Germany and The Netherlands already were preparing an additional 14 Leopard 2A4s. Along with those tanks, the 20 ex-Spanish tanks could bring the 33rd Brigade’s tank battalion back to full strength—and then some. It might even be possible for the brigade eventually to form a second tank battalion.
Observers had anticipated Spain belatedly would donate more of its 1980s-vintage Leopard 2A4s. When NATO countries first began pledging Western-style tanks to Ukraine starting in late 2022, Spain initially offered just 10 Leopard 2A4s: a surprisingly small consignment given the country’s resources.
As of 2022, the Spanish army on paper possessed 327 tanks: 108 Leopard 2A4s that it acquired from German surplus stocks in 1998, and 219 Leopard 2Es that Spanish firm Santa Barbara Sistemas manufactured under license starting in 2002.
The A4s no longer are active. They all are in storage at Casetas Logistics Center in Zaragoza. According to Spanish media, in early 2023 53 of the old tanks were repairable, but 33 of them required major rework at Santa Barbara Sistemas’ facility in Seville.
Of the 20 tanks that local media described a being in “good condition,” 10 already have shipped off to Ukraine. The other “good” tanks, plus—it seems—10 that needed extensive repairs, should comprise this second batch of 20 Ukraine-bound vehicles.
That it took a year for Spain to repair 20 Leopard 2s is scandalous but no longer surprising. How fast technicians can fix up an old tank entirely depends on the availability of spare parts. And for Ukraine’s aging Leopard 2s, parts have been very hard to come by.
In addition to those first 40 Leopard 2A4s, Ukraine has received as donations 21 newer Leopard 2A6s as well as 10 Strv 122s, which are Swedish variants of the Leopard 2A5. The Ukrainians have lost at least 14 of these tanks and abandoned another 22—many of which they subsequently recovered and sent to Poland or Lithuania for repairs.
But those repairs often take months, resulting in an artificial tank-scarcity in front-line units. When German T.V. network NTV visited a Leopard 2A6 platoon back in January, just one of the unit’s four tanks was combat-ready.
There are shortages of spares on the front line and at the repair centers. This should come as no surprise to close observers of Germany’s long military decline since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
German firms Rheinmetall and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, which manufacture most of the world’s Leopard 2s as well as most of the spare parts for the tanks, consistently have failed to produce enough spares. The parts shortage is why it has taken Rheinmetall an embarrassing nine months to overhaul the first two of the 14 extra Leopard 2s that the Dutch-German consortium promised to Ukraine.
Desperate for parts and eager to fix their tanks themselves, the Ukrainians tend to remove parts from the most badly-damaged Leopard 2s before loading them onto trucks and trains for transport to Poland or Lithuania, Maj. Gen. Christian Freuding explained. Freuding heads the German defense ministry’s Ukraine situation center.
But this cannibalization means the workers at the repairs centers have to fix battlefield damage and replace stripped parts. The repair centers aren’t just fixing tanks, they’re “rebuilding” them, Freuding said. What already was a slow repair process thus gets even slower.
Fundamentally, however, all the delays in refurbishing and repairing Leopard 2s for Ukraine comes down to: parts, parts, parts. And that’s why, 25 months into Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, most Ukrainian brigades still ride in the same Soviet-style tanks they had before the wider war.
Ukraine built many of those tanks—in particular, T-64s—at the Malyshev factory in Kharkiv. With the front line just 25 miles from Kharkiv, Kyiv has shifted much of its tank industry to workshops apparently in Zhytomyr and Lviv—as well as to the Excalibur factory in the Czech Republic and the Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa in Poland.
Excalibur and PGZ overhaul and repair T-64s, T-72s and other Soviet-style Ukrainian tanks—and do so months faster than Santa Barbara Sistemas or Rheinmetall overhaul and repair German-designed Leopard 2s.
So while some ex-Spanish Leopard 2s reportedly are in Ukraine’s future, Leopard 2s aren’t the future for the Ukrainian tank corps.