Rheinmetall wants to build a factory producing 400 tanks a year in Ukraine within 12 weeks

When the CEO of the German armor specialist Rheinmetall, Armin Papperger, announced a few months ago that he intended to build a tank and heavy armor production plant in Ukraine to support the war effort in Kyiv , number of specialists in the matter have been more than skeptical.

Indeed, such a factory, which will cost more than 200 million Euros to build, would represent a prime target for Russian missile and drone strikes, raising fears that it would be destroyed as soon as it began to produce.

However, this has not deterred the bustling German industrialist, who also sees his hopes of placing his new KF-51 tank Panther in Germany and Europe are shrinking to nothing since the arrival of Leopard 2A8 which is essential in all markets these last weeks.

In fact, Rheinmetall has just confirmed, in an interview given to CNN, which he would build with the Ukrainian Ukroboronprom, a factory in Ukraine capable of producing 400 tanks and heavy armored vehicles per year. Even more exceptional, this factory should come out of the ground and go into production in just 12 weeks, that is to say by the end of September, a real feat for the two manufacturers if they succeed. .

It must be said that today, Ukraine is facing a most worrying situation in the medium term. As we discussed earlier, Russia has in fact transformed its own industrial tool in recent months, so as to produce several hundred modern T-72B3M, T-80BVM and T-90M tanks each year, to the point of probably offsetting, in the long term, the losses recorded on the front in this area.

In contrast, Ukraine, which depends in this area on equipment transferred by its Western allies, will soon face the exhaustion of transferable stocks, particularly in Europe, while almost all of the equipment inherited from the Warsaw Pact has already been delivered, and that the new equipment, such as tanks Leopard 2, arrive slowly, insufficiently to compensate for the evolution of the balance of power.

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