RZESZOW, Poland — Ukrainian troops are burning through the available stockpiles of Russian-style ammunition, according to Ukrainian and Western officials, raising the specter of battlefield “shortages” as the battered Russian invaders regroup for a new offensive.
“I think that we have exhausted all the storages that we were able to find in the world — [from] the former Soviet republics and the African countries as well,” a senior Ukrainian official involved in the weapons procurement process told the Washington Examiner. “So we definitely still have some ammunition to use them to a point, but that ammunition is not being reproduced, so at some point, we will run out of it.”
That prospect could complicate Western efforts to arm Ukrainian forces with the heavy weaponry they’ll need to withstand the next phase of the war. The simpler Western-made systems that proved so devastating around Kyiv are expected to prove less effective in eastern Ukraine, where the terrain is more favorable to the invading Russian forces. But more advanced armaments require months of training to use and maintain. Some former Iron Curtain states that have joined NATO in recent decades have decided to open their arsenal of Soviet legacy tanks and other more advanced equipment, but those may only be a stopgap measure.
“The problem with that one is … that definitely will create some new opportunity, but it might be a short-term opportunity because they don’t produce ammunition for that anymore, and we don’t have enough in stock,” the senior Ukrainian official said. “So we will be constantly experiencing shortages.”
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That expected shortfall adds urgency to the Ukrainian request for more heavy weaponry, including NATO-standard armaments as other European officials acknowledge. “So many weapons [of Soviet origin] have already gone there and have been consumed by the war situation that there is not much to take,” Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said in a recent local media interview.
That’s a telling admission from Prague, which has coordinated tens of millions of dollars in arms deals between Ukraine and Czech defense companies — a series of sales that capitalized on the fact that the Czech defense industry had the capacity to produce Russian-style weapons most familiar to the Ukrainian troops.
“It’s true that there is only a certain [amount of ammunition] that is … available and useful and operational,” Czech Deputy Defense Minister Tomas Kopecny told the Washington Examiner. “There can be old stockpiles, but sometimes the ammunition can be more dangerous, if it’s not properly stored, for the users. So it’s true that anything, any Western-type weaponry, needs and should be shipped to Ukraine.”
Some U.S. officials have hesitated to provide more advanced weaponry, in part due to the misgiving that Russia might deem so-called offensive weapons shipments too great a threat to their forces, leading to an expansion of the war. That hesitance could be yielding to the pressure of Russian war crimes around Kyiv as well as the unexpected success of the Ukrainian forces thus far.
“We have gotten to a place in the United States, and across many members of the NATO alliance, where the key question is: What does Ukraine need, and how can we provide it to them?” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And that is the work that we are doing every day.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba welcomed the shift in the American approach, but he lamented the pace of the decision-making process, especially in Europe. “The problem with supplying weapons to Ukraine is that sometimes it comes too late,” he said in a separate appearance on the show. “If we didn’t waste a lot of time on discussing the issue of defensive against offensive and what Ukraine needs and what Ukraine doesn’t, then we would have had — we would have been in a different position now, a much stronger position.”
As for the weapons, so for the training. Lithuania, a Baltic state that has worked to galvanize trans-Atlantic support for Ukraine, has agreed to host a training site for Ukrainian forces to learn how to adopt the NATO-standard weapons they seek to acquire — but the clock is already ticking toward the resumption of the intense fighting that could decide the outcome of the war.
“Training takes three months,” a senior European official from a NATO eastern flank country said, offering that estimate as a minimum time frame for various capabilities. “If we started it on the first day of the war, [we would have] only one month left now for training. If we start it now, three months onwards, that’s the problem. But we have to do it anyway.”
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In the meantime, Ukrainian forces have to hope that the supply of weapons they can use now doesn’t run out before the arrival of the NATO-standard equipment. “We don’t know how long this [war] will take,” the senior NATO eastern flank official said. “Our expectation is that this will take a long, long time.”
