Signal No. 163 · F128: the option cleared, completion targeted for 2035

At its 48th session on Thursday morning, the Bundestag's budget committee approved the exercise of the option for four further MEKO A-200 DEU frigates from TKMS. With the four approved on 8 July, the navy gets eight identical ships, designated F128, for anti-submarine warfare. The prices were public before the vote, reported with the July conditions: EUR 5.3 billion for the second lot's construction contract against about EUR 6.3 billion for the first, development included, about EUR 11.6 billion for the eight. What the finance ministry's submission, reported on Tuesday, adds is the budget around that contract: EUR 5.6 billion for ships five to eight, the rest project support and a management reserve, with completion targeted for 2035 and about EUR 1.55 billion in operating costs for the four to 2045. The defence ministry's release gives no sum; industry, it says, has committed to deliver the first of the eight in 2029, a delivery the July conditions date to December 2029.

The item was the only defence submission on this week's agenda above the EUR 25 million threshold that needs the committee's approval. It came as an option exercise together with a notification, under the 2026 budget act, that the finance ministry intends to grant a commitment authorisation above the plan on the frigate budget line; the first quarterly progress report on the programme, a July condition, went to the committee the same morning. The July conditions also ask TKMS to take on, where possible, the subcontractors and yards left without work by the F126 cancellation, the option ships included, and ask the ministry to examine parallel production once the option is exercised. Oliver Burkhard, TKMS's chief executive, called it the largest surface-ship order in the company's history; TKMS, he said, had financed construction in advance and could now continue series production quickly. The approval allows the procurement office to exercise the option under the TKMS contract; the option runs to the end of 2026.

The programme the eight ships replace is in dispute. Damen, whose F126 contract the ministry ended on 24 June, claimed EUR 4.68 billion from the Federal Republic last week, most of it, by its lawyer's letters, owed in turn to its subcontractors; Pistorius said in July that Germany could have damages claims of EUR 2.3 billion against Damen. In August Burkhard invited those same suppliers, "all of them who are, let's say, victims of F126, as long as they deliver in time", onto the second lot. The first four are being built with hulls from Stahlbau Nord in Bremerhaven and, under a July contract of about SEK 8.7 billion, Saab's 9LV combat system, radars and composite superstructures, with deliveries from 2029 to 2032; the F126 team, Rheinmetall's Lürssen yards among them, was outside that chain. Neither the ministry's release nor the committee's agenda names a supplier for the second lot.

Andy Burnham, the British prime minister, was received by Friedrich Merz at the chancellery on Thursday, on his first visit to Germany as prime minister. At the press conference he said: "I've indicated to the Chancellor our openness to Germany joining GCAP. That is something that we seek to progress in the coming period, working with our other partners, Italy and Japan." Merz did not take up the offer in public. A German official told Reuters: "We're in a very early stage with the re-evaluation of our options. Germany hasn't taken a fixed decision, it's looking in various directions." The chancellor, the official said, prefers a European solution to a national programme; government sources told dpa the two defence ministers had been tasked to examine cooperation, "neither a decision nor a pre-decision".

Merz and Macron ended the joint FCAS fighter on 8 June; the aviation strategy the cabinet adopted on 10 June says German industry must materially shape any future fighter. On 11 June, under the name Team Gen 6, eight German companies asked Pistorius for contracts for a German-led sixth-generation aircraft "fully and on time" in the second half of 2026: Airbus Defence and Space, MBDA Deutschland, Hensoldt, Diehl Defence, MTU Aero Engines, Liebherr, Autoflug and Rohde and Schwarz. GCAP's agency signed Edgewing, the BAE Systems, Leonardo and JAIEC joint venture, to a GBP 4.6 billion development contract on 3 July, and Canada became the programme's first observer on 21 July. Germany builds the Eurofighter with Britain, Italy and Spain; Airbus Defence and Space, the first name on the Team Gen 6 declaration, is not a party to Edgewing.

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, told the Greek newspaper Kathimerini, in an interview published on Thursday, that the war is in "a strategic stalemate, which is a dangerous thing" and that "at present, there are no prospects for a negotiated settlement". Russia's condition, he said, is "the totality of Donetsk", which for Ukraine is "simply unacceptable"; a stalemate, in his account, ends either through diplomacy or through escalation beyond the current boundaries, and he named Black Sea attacks and a winter campaign against the power grid as the escalation he watches. Washington, he said, stands prepared to facilitate and continues to explore any opportunity for a settlement. On Wednesday Sergei Ryabkov, Russia's deputy foreign minister, said: "There are currently no plans to hold talks in this format."

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in Pryluky with Ed Miliband, Britain's foreign secretary, answered: "We are not in a diplomatic impasse." He added that one cannot, "on the one hand", negotiate with the Russians about future economic projects and, on the other, say one is in a diplomatic stalemate. Ukrainian negotiators travel to the United States on Friday and Saturday. The three-way technical meeting Washington proposed for late October has no date.

At 10:00 on Thursday guided aerial bombs hit two buses in Kramatorsk; by evening the Donetsk regional police counted 30 dead and the State Emergency Service 33, with 22 injured by the count of Vadym Filashkin, head of the regional military administration. Kramatorsk and Sloviansk suspended public transport. Overnight Russia launched 142 attack drones, 82 of them jet-powered, by the air force's count, with 126 shot down or jammed and hits at seven places; four people died in Kyiv, where DTEK cut power to four districts.