WARSAW — Ukraine has acquired “a couple of dozen” main battle tanks from the Czech Republic, according to a senior Ukrainian official, as Central European members of NATO race to empower the Ukrainian military to withstand an expected Russian onslaught in eastern Ukraine.
Most NATO allies have prioritized arming Ukraine with defensive weapons such as anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, while some U.S. officials have worried that more advanced weaponry deliveries might provoke Russian retaliation.
The Czech government has been involved in that effort since the first week of the war, but Czech officials are more transparent about the provision of more advanced equipment, which Prague regards as essential to the continued defense of Ukraine.
“We have given everything, almost everything, that’s in the arsenal of the heavy mechanized land forces,” Czech Deputy Defense Minister Tomas Kopecny told the Washington Examiner. “We have been shipping basically all the equipment that is needed for heavy mechanized brigades [of] the Ukraine armed forces. And the Poles, they have been doing a lot as well.”
Kopecny demurred when asked about tank deliveries specifically, but two other sources said that some tanks from the Czech Republic have arrived in Ukraine. The Czech-made T-72s will add to the dozens of Russian tanks that Ukrainian forces have captured during the war.
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“It is clear that Ukraine has now more tanks than it had before the war, and it is clear that it has also other types of equipment in larger quantities than it did before the war,” he said. “And the reasons are first, of course, the capturing of Russian vehicles, but also getting it from abroad.”
The Czech Republic also has sent “a couple of dozen” infantry fighting vehicles, known as BMPs, according to a senior Ukrainian source. The Czech government is sending the mechanized equipment while emphasizing that Russia’s withdrawal from Kyiv portends a new and perhaps more dangerous phase of the war.
“It means that [Russian forces] will only focus on those areas where they have been more successful, and therefore, it will be more of a catastrophe,” he said. “It’s quite probable that the main offensive will be regional and limited, but it could be all the more efficient. … This is going to be very, very tough.”
Ukrainian officials have intensified their call for additional weaponry in recent days, reinforced by international outrage over the discovery of civilians killed en masse in Bucha, a town that was occupied by Russian forces during the battle around Kyiv.
“Ukraine must get all the necessary weapons to drive the occupiers out of our land as soon as possible, to liberate our cities,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday. “And if we had already got what we needed, all these planes, tanks, artillery, anti-missile, and anti-ship weapons, we could have saved thousands of people. I do not blame you — I blame only the Russian military — but you could have helped.”
Ukrainian and Russian officials have met for peace talks, but those talks have made little progress, and Zelensky emphasized Thursday that he will not agree to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demand for the “demilitarization” of Ukraine. Rather, Ukrainian officials plan to follow the Israeli example in hardening its society against any future Russian invasions.
“We explained that the army must be in line with the army we have, which is able to defend our state,” Zelensky said. “We cannot talk about ‘Switzerland of the future’ — probably, our state will be able to be like this a long time after. But we will definitely become a ‘big Israel’ with its own face.”
Ukrainian and Western officials do not expect those dialogues to produce a ceasefire before an expected Russian effort to “destroy” the bulk of the Ukrainian military, which is deployed in eastern Ukraine, where Russian forces have had more success.
“They definitely need large, heavy land forces equipment — main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, armored personnel carriers, artillery of all sorts, anti-aircraft, anti-missile air defense,” he said. “Heavy artillery is crucial, and I would even say more crucial than the tanks themselves, because we haven’t really seen main battles fought between large numbers of tanks so far, but what we have seen was precision strikes, by artillery on both sides, being used as one of the most important parts of the warfare so far.”
The survival of those troops, Kopecny estimated, will depend on the speed with which U.S. and European governments provide new weaponry for this more difficult conflict. “There’s no time [for us] to think for another three or four weeks before we send it. But there is enough time to make decisions right now that help Ukrainians,” he said. “It is just important to realize that we do not have much time, but we have enough time.”
A substantial percentage of the Czech military aid to Ukraine has been financed by an online fundraising campaign launched in coordination with the Ukrainian Embassy in Prague. Kopecny, while pleased by that initiative and the direct aid from the government, expressed hope that the United States and wealthier Western European countries would provide more military equipment and funding to buy more weapons.
“The U.S. has been one of the countries that has been most active since the beginning, if not the most, in helping Ukraine, in supporting them with weapons,” he said. “But still, compared to the other initiatives, compared to the other amounts of money they are spending on other initiatives that will help Ukraine, if the focus will be more on the military aid, or at least equal, this would be the biggest game-changer.”
A trans-Atlantic discussion of such support will take place this week, as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and his counterparts across NATO travel to Brussels for a major ministerial, in the shadow of the massacres discovered in the suburbs near Kyiv.
“What we’ve seen in Bucha is not the random act of a rogue unit. It’s a deliberate campaign to kill, to torture, to rape, to commit atrocities,” Blinken said Tuesday. “What’s vital is to sustain and build on the support for Ukraine, to sustain and build on the pressure against Russia to bring this war to an end, to stop the death and destruction that Russia’s perpetrating in Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s biggest supporters in NATO, thus far, have been the U.S., the United Kingdom, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, according to Kopecny. This week’s meeting will occur against a backdrop of intensified pressure for major Western European countries such as France and Germany to increase their aid.
“The French are not actually promoting any particular system, like even the [U.S.] or the Brits that would be helping Ukraine militarily,” Kopecny said. “They are the presiding country of the council of the European Union, and there is no coordination — there is no big appeal [to the effect that] this is the most important thing we should all be thinking about and working [on] when it comes to the EU.”
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The senior Czech defense official cautioned that European leaders should not feel too much relief at the cessation of fighting around Kyiv.
“There are new things coming, new grave threats coming,” he said. “And this can be the silence before the storm.”
