Ukraine has depleted its stockpiles of weapons in its confrontation with Russia and, amid an artillery war in Donbass, is counting on Western help to hold out.
After three months of war, Ukraine is in trouble on the armaments side. “We’ve used up almost all of our ammunition” in artillery, Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, told Britain’s The Guardian newspaper this week. According to multiple US military sources, the country has used up almost all of its Russian- and Soviet-made weapons and is now dependent on weapons supplied to it by foreign allies, including Western artillery.
The clashes in the Donbass have turned into an artillery war in which Russia is better equipped than Ukraine, which is “using its last stocks of weapon systems and ammunition from the Soviet era,” the Institute for War Research (ISW) also wrote on Friday. And Kyiv will “need constant Western support” in this regard, as “effective artillery will be increasingly crucial in the largely static fighting in eastern Ukraine.”
“Supplies are slowly running out, and making shells takes time, it’s a technology around steel making, you have to forge a bomb body, you have to put in a certain number of assemblies… So that’s the difficulty that Ukrainians are facing.” are facing this repeated call for Western help,” said General Jérôme Pellistrandi, defense adviser to BFMTV.
“They fire between 4,000 and 6,000 shells a day”
“There is an alarm because a certain number of pieces of equipment that Ukraine had from the start are coming to the end of their useful life, either because they have been destroyed or because they are too worn out,” explains Jérôme Pellistrandi. On the other hand, “ammunition consumption was extremely high. It is estimated that on the Ukrainian side between 4000 and 6000 shells are fired per day”.
And these are not weapons that can be reused, new ones are constantly needed, at least as long as the war is on.
The Allies are trying to coordinate and synchronize their military aid to Kyiv so that Ukrainian forces receive a “continuous flow of ammunition,” but also of spare parts and light weapons, another US military official said.
But “Western stockpiles are mostly depleted,” explains our defense adviser, and “although Western aid on the ground is genuine and consumption is extremely important. It also means that on the Ukrainian side, extreme attention must be paid to the accuracy of their weapon” in order to waste as little as possible.
Artillery delivered in Dribs and Drabs
Despite repeated pleas from Ukrainians, Western armor appears to be penetrating. That’s partly because the Allies want to make sure Kyiv can absorb it safely and limit the chance of bombing its stockpiles of ammunition. In fact, the Russians are targeting the Ukrainian army’s reserves of weapons.
In a statement, Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Sunday that “sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles (…) near Tchortkiv destroyed a large warehouse containing anti-tank missile systems, man-portable air defenses and shells supplied to the Kiev regime by the United States and European countries”.
The United States is therefore sending its military aid in installments, the last of which, announced on June 1, included 700 million, four Himars artillery systems but also 1,000 additional Javelin anti-tank missiles and four Mi-17 helicopter shells for howitzers, 15 light armored ones Vehicles and other ammunition of various calibers.
Weapons that “require significant learning”
The Himars is a “sophisticated” system and “you have to certify these boys, make sure they know how to use these systems properly,” U.S. Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley also said, explaining the delivery in stages. It is necessary to train the operators, but also the soldiers in charge of maintenance, as well as the officers and non-commissioned officers, so that they are deployed where it is needed, when it is needed, he explained.
“Western equipment that has been and is being delivered, well, it’s complicated, it’s sophisticated, it requires significant learning, which is why we, the French, for example, got Ukrainian soldiers to train them on Caesar weapons,” says Jérôme Pellistrandi . “It takes a while.”
Salomé Vincendon with the AFP journalist BFMTV