Ukraine outgunned in the east despite arms pledges
Holed up in a bombed-out house in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian troops keep a careful accounting of their ammunition, using a door as a sort of ledger. Scrawled in chalk on the door are figures for mortar shells, smoke shells, shrapnel shells, flares.
Despite the heavy influx of weapons from the West, Ukrainian forces are outgunned by the Russians in the battle for the eastern Donbas region, where the fighting is largely artillery exchanges. While the Russians can keep up continuous fire for hours, the defenders can’t match the enemy in either weapons or ammunition and must use their ammo more judiciously.
At the outpost in eastern Ukraine, dozens and dozens of mortar shells are stacked up. But the troops’ commander, Mykhailo Strebizh, lamented that if his fighters were to come under an intense artillery barrage, their cache would, at best, amount to only about four hours’ worth of return fire.
Ukrainian authorities say the West’s support for the country is not sufficient and is not arriving on the battlefield fast enough for this grinding and highly lethal phase of the war.
While Russia has kept quiet about its casualties, Ukrainian authorities say up to 200 of their soldiers are dying each day. Russian forces are gaining ground in the east, but experts say they are taking heavy losses.
The United States last week upped the ante with its largest pledge of aid for Ukrainian forces yet: an additional US$1 billion ($1.6b) in military assistance. But experts note that such aid deliveries haven’t kept pace with Ukraine’s needs, in part because defence industries aren’t turning out weaponry fast enough.
“We’re moving from peacetime to wartime,” said Francois Heisbourg, a senior adviser at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research think-tank.
“Peacetime means low production rates, and ramping up the production rate means that you have to first build industrial facilities . . . This is a defence-industrial challenge which is of a very great magnitude.”
The Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany last week reported that the US has delivered about half of its pledged commitments in military support for Ukraine, and Germany about onethird. Poland and Britain have delivered much of what they promised.
Many foot soldiers say they can’t even begin to match the Russians shot for shot, or shell for shell.
Earlier this month, Ukraine’s ambassador in Madrid, Serhii Phoreltsev, thanked Spain — which trumpeted a shipment of 181 tonnes of military aid in April — but said the ammunition was enough for only two hours of combat. Ukrainian filmmaker-turnedfighter Volodymyr Demchenko tweeted a video expressing gratitude for guns sent by the Americans, saying, “It’s nice guns, and 120 bullets to
each.” But he lamented: “It’s like 15 minutes of a fight.”
Part of the problem, too, is that the Ukrainian forces, whose country was once a member of the Soviet Union, are more familiar with Soviet-era weaponry and must first be trained on the Nato equipment.
An untold number of Ukrainians have travelled abroad to get training on the Western weapons.
Of the US$1B pledge from the US, only slightly more than one-third of that will be rapid, off-the-shelf deliveries
by the Pentagon, and the rest will be available over a longer term. The pledge, which includes 18 howitzers and 36,000 rounds of ammunition, addresses Ukraine’s plea for more longer-range weaponry.
That’s still far short of what the Ukrainians want — 1000 155mm howitzers, 300 multiple-launch rocket systems, 500 tanks, 2000 armoured vehicles and 1000 drones — as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s adviser Mikhail Podolyak tweeted last week. —AP*