Ukraine-Russia war latest: Germany confirms it will send tanks to Kyiv as Kremlin warns of ‘blatant provocation’

Germany has finally announced it is sending tanks to Ukraine that Kyiv says it desperately needs to fight Russia’s invasion.

My colleague Chris Stevenson has the story:

The Norwegian government is considering whether to send some of its German-made Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, Oslo-based newspapers Aftenposten and Dagens Naeringsliv reported late on Tuesday.

No decision to send the heavy battle tanks has yet been made, according to each of the papers, quoting anonymous sources familiar with the deliberation.

NATO member Norway, which itself borders Russia, may contribute either four or eight of the country’s 36 Leopard 2 tanks, according to Dagens Naeringsliv.

The United States and Germany are poised to provide a significant boost to Kyiv’s war effort with the delivery of heavy battle tanks, sources have said, a move Moscow condemned as a “blatant provocation”.

Washington was expected to announce as soon as Wednesday that it will send M1 Abrams battle tanks and Berlin has decided to dispatch Leopard 2 tanks, the sources said, a reversal in policy that Kyiv has said would help reshape the conflict.

Germany has bowed to international pressure and agreed to send battle tanks to Ukraine, reports say.

While there has been no official confirmation from Berlin so far, officials in Kyiv swiftly hailed what they said was a potential gamechanger on the battlefield.

“A few hundred tanks for our tank crews – the best tank crews in the world,” Andriy Yermak, the head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration, wrote on Telegram. “This is what is going to become a real punching fist of democracy against the autocracy from the bog.”

My colleague Andy Gregory reports:

Recent corruption scandals among Ukrainian officials do not appear to have involved US military and humanitarian assistance supplied to Ukraine, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said.

Mr Price said the Biden administration nonetheless continues its “rigorous oversight” of American aid.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has forced out a number of top officials in Ukraine’s government as he launches a renewed crackdown on corruption.

Mr Zelensky made fighting corruption a central pillar of his presidential election campaign, before Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine became the focus of his attention. As the war reaches its first anniversary, with Kyiv worried about fresh offensives from Moscow’s forces as we move out of the harshest part of winter, the Ukrainian president appears to be taking the opportunity for a reset of officials, either via dismissal or resignation.

Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz is expected to announce his government will approve supplying German-made battle tanks to Ukraine in a speech to parliament early afternoon.

The long-awaited decision came after weeks of hesitation and mounting pressure on Berlin to allow the supply.

Members of Mr Scholz’s three-party coalition government welcomed the news ahead of the official announcement.

“The Leopard’s freed!” said German lawmaker Katrin Goering-Eckardt, a senior Green party lawmaker.

Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, a member of the Free Democratic Party who chairs the parliamentary defence committee, said the news was “a relief for a mistreated and brave Ukraine.” “The decision to approve (other countries’ requests) and supply the Leopard 2 was arduous, but unavoidable,” she said. She had been one of the loudest voices calling for a swift decision on arms supplies to Ukraine.

The Russian-installed governor of Ukraine‘s Donetsk region said on Wednesday that units of the private military company Wagner were making progress in the town of Bakhmut.

He said fighting is going on in previously Ukrainian-held neighbourhoods.

Ukrainian army said: “Russian troops tried to attack the stronghold of our border guards near Bakhmut. The enemy several times sent reinforcements in this direction.

Russia is preparing a small number of T-14 Armata main battle tanks for the type’s first operational deployment in Ukraine, the British Ministry of Defence said in its intelligence update.

Previously, the Russian forces deployed in Ukraine were reluctant to accept the first tranche of T-14 allocated to them because the vehicles were in such poor condition.

In 2021, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu described the planned production run for 2022 as only an “experimental-industrial” batch.

“Therefore, it is unlikely that any deployed T-14 tanks will have met the usual standards for new equipment to be deemed operational,” it said.

It remains unclear exactly what aspects of the vehicles prompted the U-turn.

Russia has decried Washington’s plans to transfer confiscated Russian assets to the rebuilding of Ukraine as “theft”.

Russia deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov said: “It is theft. A country based on the rule of law is now engaged in denying itself, so people declaring these kinds of ideas have got a little carried away with geopolitics, they are hurting themselves.”

It came as the US Justice Department spokesman, Andrew Adams, said that he expected the US to send the assets seized from Russian elites to help war-torn Ukraine.

A British man has been arrested in Spain for extradition to the US for allegedly helping an oligarch with close ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin evade sanctions.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement that Richard Masters, 52, was arrested by the Spanish Guardia Civil last Friday, though his Russian-Swiss co-accused Vladislav Osipov remains at large.

The pair are charged separately, in indictments unsealed in the US District Court in the District of Columbia, with facilitating a scheme for oligarch Viktor Vekselberg connected to his $90m (£73m), 255-foot yacht Tango.

Mr Masters is alleged to have devised a scheme that involved calling the yacht “the Fanta” to hide from banks the hundreds of thousands of pounds in payments in US currency that were ultimately to Mr Vekselberg’s benefit.