Spain has already donated 40 armored caterpillar transports, in a growing Western flow of war vehicles to the front
This Monday leaves the port of Bilbao a civilian merchant ship with twenty TOA armored personnel carriers on board. It is chartered by the Ministry of Defense through a Basque consignee. Their destination is a Baltic port – no further details have been given – where they will land to embark on their way to Ukraine through Poland.
With those acronyms, TOA, those of Transport Tracked Armored, is called in the Army the M113 armored personnel carriers, of North American design and in service in successive versions for six decades in the armed forces of all NATO. The TOA of this shipment have been arriving and concentrating in the port of Bilbao since last Thursday, loaded by special trucks, large gondolas with three armored vehicles each and 40 tons of cargo in a long convoy. In the Basque section of the route they have been escorted by a special deployment of the Ertzaintza.
In any case, the TOA is not just “a truck with a fairly thick sheet metal”, as a veteran user of this type of material in Cavalry units ironically. at its top mount a heavy machine gunof 12.7 millimeters, and has the capacity to carry mortars and Spike anti-tank missile launchers (of which Spain would have also donated to Ukraine, although this point has not been confirmed by Defense), in addition to its original task: to carry troops, move under cover of bullets and shrapnel to a platoon of 10 soldiers and release them to unfold.
Growing flow of armored
This consignment of TOAs -whose delivery was confirmed by the Defense Minister, Daisy Roblesa few days ago visiting the Army mission in Latvia – is the second delivered by Spain, after a first donation last September of another 20 vehicles prepared for the transport of troops and sapper missions, which were taken from units in the south and also sent by sea. In total there are already 40 Spanish TOAs whose donation to Ukraine has come to light.
The arrival of the Army’s armored vehicles in the combat zone will be almost simultaneous with the arrival in Ukraine of another group of TOAs, in this case announced two weeks ago by Portugal. The neighboring country will send the next days a freight of 14, second shipment of a similar number in their aid packages to Ukraine, as confirmed by their authorities.
The flow of western armor towards the front is thickening. This weekend, Canada opened with an early main battle tank Leopard 2 an airlift of tank shipments, five in a first phase of delivery.
The amount is not fixed. Except for Germany and the United States, the governments of the Atlantic Alliance involved in this new wave of shipments of war material they leave in a haze the exact number of cars and armored vehicles that they are going to deliver to kyiv. Although the final amount may well depend on the proximity of a Russian offensive and how the Ukrainian army withstands the onslaught.
On the Donbas and Zaporiya fronts, the Western countries are getting rid of old material to which the Ukrainian military is giving “a new life with great results”, comments the aforementioned military source. Spain has 1,200 TOA vehicles, mainly for combat, sappers and casualty evacuation. Despite a recent Defense modernization program for old vehicles, a large part of this endowment is destined to be gradually replaced by the Dragon wheeled combat vehicles and the Pizarro Cavalry combat vehicles.