Germany has said it will be sending weapons to Ukraine after it initially declined to do so.
The country has announced that it’s now committed to delivering the Gepard anti-aircraft system to Ukraine.
The country’s defense minister, Christine Lambrecht made the announcement during a meeting of international defense officials at the Ramstein US Air Force base in Germany on Tuesday, CNN reports.
“We decided yesterday that we will support Ukraine with anti-aircraft systems … which is exactly what Ukraine needs now to secure the airspace from the ground,” Lambrecht said during the meeting at the base.
Since the commencement of the war, it is the first time Germany has agreed to provide this type of heavy weaponry to Ukraine as it struggles to end Russian invasion.
Germany had only agreed initially to provide humanitarian assistance and not weapons. It said her decision was based on a decades-long policy of not supplying lethal weapons to crisis areas.
Just months before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, the then-new German government agreed to include the restrictive arms export policy into its coalition agreement.
But facing pressure from allies and the German public, the government was forced to overhaul the rules. By late February, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced Germany would start delivering some weapons to Ukraine, although at that point he insisted on calling them “defensive.”
He also announced Germany would start pumping more money into its own armed forces.