Kirilo Budanov, head of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence service, warned in mid-October that the Ukrainian armed forces would “certainly have a problem” if the Israeli military operation in Gaza lasted longer than a few weeks. A month later, its President Volodymyr Zelensky confirmed that ammunition supplies to Israel, particularly from the United States, had led to a decline in arms transfers for its troops. “Our supplies are reduced, that’s life, it’s normal when everyone is fighting for survival, including us,” Zelensky said at a meeting with the media on Thursday.
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“My priority is to get help from the West,” said the president, “because attention is focused on the Middle East and for other reasons and without their support we will go backwards.” The president emphasized that, above all, The supply of 155-millimeter ammunition used by NATO howitzers deployed in Ukraine has suffered “a real slowdown.” Zelensky expressed similar words during his meeting with the new British Foreign Minister David Cameron in Kiev on Thursday: “The world is not focusing on the situation on our war front, the attention is divided and it does not help us at all.”
Ukraine suffers from a serious ammunition deficit because the Western military industry cannot meet its daily projectile consumption. At the most intense moments of the summer counteroffensive, Ukrainian artillery could consume as much in three days as the United States defense industry produces in a month. Valeri Zaluzhni, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, admitted in an article in The Economist in November this year that his NATO partners’ new weapons production lines will not be able to supply Kiev with ammunition at full capacity for at least a year.
The European Union has committed to supplying Ukraine with one million artillery shells in a year, by spring 2024, but both the Ukrainian and German governments have already warned that this will be impossible: the arsenals of NATO partners are below the minimum value, and these must also be restored.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza was a setback for Kiev from the moment it was confirmed that the United States would halt the agreed transfer to Ukraine of 300,000 projectiles stored in Israel. Military analysts warned back in October that the crisis in Gaza could harm Ukraine. Mark F. Cancian, an American colonel, noted in an Oct. 12 paper for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that Israel “will have priority because its relationship with the United States is closer and longer than that of Ukraine. “The Republican Party, which has a majority in the US Congress, has blocked future military aid packages for Ukraine proposed by the White House because it believes they are aimed at a war with no signs of an imminent outcome, that benefits North American interests.
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As Bloomberg reported, Zelensky used the meeting with the press to reveal that his intelligence services had information that Moscow had launched a disinformation plan aimed at dividing Ukrainian society and provoking a coup against it. The president did not provide any further details. The Ukrainian authorities have been denouncing for weeks that the pessimistic reports from the main international media about the situation at the front are partly fueled by Russian propaganda. Zaluzhni sparked unprecedented controversy during the war in Ukraine when he admitted in The Economist that the front was at a standstill and there was no chance of making further progress in driving out Russian troops.
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