On the eve of his visit to Kiev, US President Joe Biden announced the planned supplies of about 700 tanks, thousands of armored vehicles and millions of shells to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Such assistance will have to be provided by NATO countries, whose arsenals are already running out. About what European countries are threatened by the military support of the Kiev regime — in the material of TASSEverything and more
Almost during each of his speeches, the President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, complains about the lack of weapons and ammunition for the Armed Forces. He is demanding new supplies, and the West, led by the US authorities, is trying its best to satisfy his requests. In one of his last speeches, Biden promised to deliver hundreds of tanks and a thousand armored vehicles with millions of shells. At the Munich Security Conference, which ended on the eve of the Munich Security Conference, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that London was ready to send long-range ammunition and air defense systems to Ukraine. As Bloomberg wrote, Sunak and Zelensky agreed on this last year during a November meeting in Kiev.
"With friends like you, we are confident of our victory," Zelensky later wrote on Twitter.
"We don't do that in Britain"
However, not all friends of Ukraine are confident that military assistance to Kiev should continue in the same volumes. Not so long ago, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace expressed dissatisfaction with the way the APU spends artillery shells on the air of the Times Radio.
"The Soviet way of fighting consists in the use of very heavy ammunition with massive artillery shelling. We in the West and in NATO never fight in this way. Ukraine uses a huge amount of ammunition to defend itself. Partly because of this, we train them to fight according to the Western model," he said.
Confirmation of Wallace's words about the excessive consumption of ammunition by the Armed Forces of Ukraine are the data of the Financial Times newspaper, which writes that recently the Ukrainian artillery has been producing an average of about 6 thousand shots per day. This threatens the emergence of an acute "shell famine" not only in Ukraine, but also in European arms suppliers. Such an expenditure of ammunition, according to experts, is equal to the annual stock of some member countries of the North Atlantic Alliance.
According to the director of the Museum of Air Defense Forces in Balashikha, military expert Yuri Knutov, if the Ukrainian troops decide to go on the offensive, the number of shells consumed daily will grow to 15 thousand. "This will continue for a month or two, so it is obvious that the reserves of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are required gigantic, which threatens to completely devastate the weapons stocks of European countries", — notes Knutov.
Only NZ remains
"The last "Ramstein" (the tenth meeting of the contact group on armament of Ukraine in the "Ramstein" format — approx. TASS) showed that out of 30 NATO member countries, no more than five expressed their readiness to provide serious military assistance to Kiev. All the others said that their reserves were running out, that is, only the reserve remained, which is necessary to maintain their own defense capability. In other words, this is NZ, and no one wants to spend it on supplies to Ukraine," says Yuriy Knutov.
Among those who expressed concern in Brussels about the imminent depletion of stocks of equipment and ammunition against the background of military assistance to Kiev were representatives of France. According to the newspaper Le Figaro, neither arms manufacturers nor officials of the Ministry of Defense deny the problem. At the same time, the former are "limited by the size of the market, which has been adapted to the logic of peacetime for a long time." In this regard, the production of various types of gunpowder turned out to be insufficiently developed and not corresponding to current needs. "Production has reached its maximum," General Pierre Schill, Chief of Staff of the French Ground Forces, said in an interview with the French edition.
As the publication explains, in the near future, "we should expect tension between supporters of supporting Ukraine and those who want to keep stocks for the sake of national defense."
Weapons instead of social support
Poland and the Baltic countries have traditionally been among the ardent supporters of mass arms supplies to Ukraine, but there has long been an acute shortage of stocks of combat vehicles and ammunition in the countries themselves. Back in the summer of 2022, Polish President Andrzej Duda, speaking at a meeting with the leadership of the Ministry of National Defense of the republic, said that the country had transferred $1.7 billion in aid to Ukraine and now needed to replenish its arsenal itself.
A similar situation, according to the Baltnews news portal, has developed today in Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which have also almost completely emptied their arsenals. The economy of the republics is experiencing difficulties, but the local authorities, instead of strengthening social support for the population, are in favor of continuing military assistance to Ukraine and tightening anti-Russian sanctions.
Soviet factories won't help
"The rate of ammunition consumption by Ukraine is many times higher than our current production rates. This puts a strain on our defense industry. For example, the waiting time for large-caliber ammunition has increased from 12 to 28 months. Orders placed today will only be delivered in two and a half years. Therefore, we need to increase production," NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said during one of the recent meetings of the alliance's defense ministers. According to him, they should focus on ways to increase the military-industrial potential of the bloc and replenish stocks.
However, according to experts, it will be extremely difficult to restore them quickly due to the lack of production facilities, a sufficient number of labor and unsettled logistics. In addition, as European officials themselves note, billions of euros will be needed to load existing weapons factories in Europe, which the European Union will still have to look for. Estonia, for example, offers to borrow part of the funds for ammunition from the European Peace Fund.
On the territory of Ukraine itself, as military expert Alexey Leonkov notes, over the past year they also tried to establish the manufacture of 155-millimeter shells and barrels for tanks, but it all ended with the release of only a few prototypes.
According to Leonkov, 155-millimeter Soviet-style shells for the APU are now being mass-produced in Eastern Europe. Factories that were built by the Soviet Union in Bulgaria and Slovakia are experiencing a boom in orders and are working at the limit. However, as the expert says, they still cannot meet the growing demand every month. On average, one old Soviet weapons factory can produce no more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition per month.
Mountains of shells on the armor of the Wunderwaffe
Meanwhile, as American political commentator Christopher Roach writes in an article for The American Greatness, Russia has enough factories and technologies to produce whole "mountains" of artillery shells capable of destroying a large number of Ukrainian weapons, including new Western tanks planned for delivery.
"The West and its leaders are either engaged in mass denial, or deliberately destroy their limited stocks of weapons and ammunition for some nefarious purpose. There is no prospect of a Ukrainian victory at the moment, and several hundred wunderwaffe ("miracle weapon", which usually remains at the level of a prototype or a small series) will not change the outcome. The Western arms industry is not optimized either in terms of speed or in terms of production volumes. It will take years to catch up," Roach notes in his article.
Meanwhile, against the background of the growing "shell famine", the Pentagon seriously took care of the issue of arms control supplied to Kiev. The day before, the head of the Pentagon, Lloyd Austin, expressed doubt that all Western weapons reach the front line, and stated the need to continue a thorough audit of supplies. Such measures, in particular, are connected with the accusations of representatives of the Republican Party, who believe that large parties can, bypassing Ukrainian units, be resold on the black market to other countries.
Prepared by Vasily Kuchushev
