This week, Spain will resume shipments of weapons to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense with two new flights of A400M transport aircraft from the Air Force. The first will come out this Monday with a shipment of weapons and ammunition (grenade launchers, machine guns, cartridges, etc.); while the second will carry an armored ambulance on Tuesday to evacuate the wounded from areas threatened by Russian troops. The cost of the military equipment donated to kyiv since February 27 is already around 48 million euros, according to government sources.
With these two there will be eight flights with military material (offensive and protective) sent by Spain to support kyiv’s resistance to the Russian invasion. The Government has negotiated with Eastern European countries that are clients of the Spanish military industry, such as Estonia and the Czech Republic, the delivery to the Ukrainian authorities of the material they have purchased, with the commitment of the manufacturers to replace it as soon as possible. However, the deliveries that will be made this week are still the product of scouring the arsenals of the Spanish Armed Forces in search of material that can be donated.
It is a complex operation because, on the one hand, it must respond to the list of needs that Ukraine has sent to the allies, be easy to transport and not require specific instructions that are impossible to give at this time. Added to this is the fact that much of the Ukrainian Army’s weapons are Soviet-made; with calibers different from those of NATO.
These requirements are met by the ambulance that until now belonged to the Army. It is one of 10 that the Ministry of Defense acquired in 2007 as part of an order for 180 RG-31 Nyala armored vehicles from the South African subsidiary of the British firm BAE Systems. Most of them were deployed in Afghanistan, where Spanish troops were being attacked by the insurgency with mines, grenade launchers and improvised explosive devices (IED).
On Tuesday’s flight, Defense also plans to send 54 pallets (83 cubic meters) of medicines and medical supplies from the Defense Military Pharmacy Center and the Gómez Ulla military hospital. The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, announced last Thursday in Brussels, where he participated in an extraordinary NATO summit, that “in the next few days” there would be new shipments of “offensive and defensive” material to Ukraine, although without further specifying.
All these shipments should be financed from the fund of up to 1,000 million euros that the EU has made available to Ukraine to finance its rearmament, of which Spain is the fourth donor, with around 10% of the total. The cost of the military material donated so far by the Government, including the one that will be delivered next week, is around 48 million euros, of which three correspond to 20 tons of protective equipment, such as helmets, bulletproof vests and NBC suits ( Nuclear, Biological and Chemical).
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