German firm Rheinmetall has built 3,600 Leopard 2s. With its exquisite balance of speed, armor and firepower, it’s widely considered at least the equal of the American M-1, itself the gold standard for modern tanks.Īnd there’s no shortage of Leopard 2s. A series of updates have kept the 69-ton, four-person tank with its 120-millimeter cannon at the bleeding edge of armored warfare for five decades. West Germany developed the Leopard 2 in the 1970s and fielded the early models in the 1980s. They easily outmatch Russian tanks such as the T-72, T-80 and T-90. It’s not hard to see why Ukrainian tankers crave Leopard 2s. "We need these tanks," Oleksii Makeiev, the Ukrainian ambassador in Berlin, said back in May. Surplus Leopard 2s, of which there are many hundreds across Europe, are the obvious solution. While the Ukrainian army already had T-72s in its inventory and certainly welcomed fresh copies to both make good battlefield losses and form new tank battalions, the army is desperate for more and better tanks.
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