Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, the German government said it would spend €100bn on modernising its army, the Bundeswehr. For Renzo Di Leo, a captain in Germany’s 37th armoured infantry brigade, the big question is: what took it so long?
“We’ve known about the threat from Russia at least since it annexed Crimea in 2014,” he says. “The political response to that could have come much sooner.”
Di Leo is part of a multinational Nato force that held a major training exercise in northern Germany earlier this month. For days, tanks and artillery guns pounded the moors and forests of the Lüneburg Heath, stirring up clouds of dust so high they blocked out the sun.