I think Germany is the most committed major economy in this fight.
Neither France, the UK or the USA have really suffered Russian occupation like Germany did.
Germany might sometimes be relatively quiet and they lagged in the begginning to avoid escalation, but they are together with the Poles, Baltics and Finns in knowing first hand what Russkiy Mir really means.
Germany didn’t really lag behind to avoid escalation, it’s just that the German military was a underfunded mess and the complicated bureaucracy of delivering arms slowed everything down at first.
The German military is actually pretty well funded. It’s just that they spend most of those funds on… well, they don’t really seem to know themselves.
Nope, before the current government was elected, the Bundeswehr was underfunded to the point where they didn’t even fulfill NATO’s two percent target. They spent a ton of money on advisors and expensive contracts on top, but that alone was not the reason they were under budget.
Fair, but France spends almost the same amount of euros, but also maintains a nuclear arsenal, and an aircraft carrier and whatever we call colonial forces nowadays. That implies it’s not so much a funding issue, but a spending issue.
Of course, you can fix a spending issue by finding it more, and Germany is only around 1.4% of GDP.
The biggest enemy of the Bundeswehr is the BAAINBw, the Bundesamt für Ausrüstung, Informationstechnik und Nutzung der Bundeswehr.
That target was due in 2024 and isn’t reached by about half of all member states. Constantly bringing that up will just make you sound like a Trumpist.
No we know it perfectly well: It’s spent on gold-plating and avoiding corruption in procurement by having an extremely oversized bureaucratic apparatus. The gold-plating is a matter of taste, as to the bureaucratic overhead, I sometimes wonder whether it wouldn’t be cheaper to just out-bribe companies.
With an incompetent defense minister that had absolutely no clue what the fucking hell she was doing.
But yeah, Germany was actually one of the first to commit weaponry to Ukraine after the second day of the start of the major invasion.
I’ll just take your word that that’s what the article says. lol
The article says that, but it’s from Bild, one of the worst German news sites/papers. Can’t really trust it. They’re constantly lying or pushing their own POV or create drama for no reason.
Fortunately, reputable Tagesschau now confirms the information.
Although I usually hesitate to click on Bild.de links, I’ve made an exception this time: The original plan was 4 billion €, now 8 billion € plus 2 billion € for general long term military aid.
As some in this thread show -understandibly- little trust in the source of this news, here is a Bloomber news about.
[German] Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s governing coalition has agreed to double German military aid for Ukraine next year to €8 billion ($8.6 billion), people familiar with the matter said.
If approved by the parliament in Berlin where Scholz’s parties hold a majority, the boost would lift Germany’s defense spending beyond the 2% of gross domestic product target pledged by all North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, according to the people [… who asked not to be identified since the plan isn’t public yet. A Defense Ministry spokesperson declined to comment.]
So it needs the parliament’s vote, but that’s quite safe given the ruling coalition’s majority.
