An arms company covets land to increase its production for the benefit of Ukraine. The municipality in question, in western Germany, opposes this in the name of local development. And Europe’s entire ability to make more weapons is being called into question.
The mayor of Troisdorf, a town of almost 80,000 people not far from Cologne, did not expect to be caught up in the whirlwind of international politics. But it was him who the German Defense Minister challenged in early December in the Chamber of Deputies, asking municipalities and regions to work to accelerate the pace of weapons manufacturing.
For weeks, the municipality of Troisdorf has been facing a confrontation with the German arms giant Diehl Defence, which produces in its local factory the ignition devices necessary to ignite large quantities of explosives, for example missile and rocket charges. These parts are used, in particular, in the manufacture of the Iris-T mobile air defense system, of which the German Government delivered a third unit to Ukraine at the end of November.
Housing and offices
The Troisdorf site is therefore an important link in the service of European objectives of military support for Ukraine, a country that is urging its allies to provide it with more ammunition as it struggles to repel the Russian offensive. The EU pledged in the spring to deliver one million projectiles to Ukraine by March. So far it has delivered some 300,000 artillery ammunition using its now depleted stocks.
The participation of German industry in this plan should ultimately amount to between 300,000 and 400,000 shells per year, that is, more than triple the production that occurred when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, industrial sources told AFP. . But Diehl Defense sees the future of its headquarters in Troisdorf seriously threatened, since the city decided to appropriate part of the activity area in which the group is established, through its subsidiary DynITEC.
The arms manufacturer wanted to buy the land put up for sale by the former arms company Dynamit Nobel, in order to expand its production capacity. For its part, the municipality plans to transform this area the size of 50 football fields, ideally located near the city center, into a residential and commercial space.
Resistors
A wide spectrum of elected officials, from the conservative mayor (CDU) Alexander Bieber to the Greens and the far-left “Die Linke”, i.e. two-thirds of the municipal council, refuse to sacrifice such an area in the city center .
Because, according to the municipality’s argument, “the production of explosives and combat devices requires huge ‘liquidation’ areas”, that is, protection zones around the factory that cannot be built for security reasons. For Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, president of the Bundestag Defense Committee, the position of the mayor of Troisdorf “is simply irresponsible.”
The mayor of Troisdorf is currently insensitive to national pressure. From mediation to conciliation meetings, the last one before Christmas, no agreement has yet been reached. He’s not the only one resisting. This summer, the Rheinmetall group, another flagship of the German arms industry, announced that it would give up building a gunpowder factory in the Saxony region of eastern Germany. The project had generated concern among the local population. Ultimately, the factory should be built in Bavaria.
kyiv needs three million ammunition a year, Estonia’s Defense Minister said this fall. His German counterpart estimated that the EU would not be able to meet its goal of delivering one million ammunition to Ukraine by spring 2024.
Source: BFM TV
