India has hundreds of thousands of artillery shells in its arsenal; Germany is conducting secret negotiations with New Delhi on the purchase of ammunition for Ukraine through intermediaries, since the Indian authorities do not want to sell them openly due to relations with Russia. This was reported on February 25 Der Spiegel with reference to sources.
Similar deals could also be struck with Arab countries that have large stockpiles of ammunition. According to experts, some African and Balkan countries have the necessary reserves or the ability to produce ammunition.
As the publication noted, German intelligence services believe that Ukraine will exhaust its own reserves of shells no later than June, and possibly earlier.
“Unfortunately, artillery and anti-aircraft ammunition are not so widely available on shelves around the world,” said the head of the situation center for Ukraine at the German Ministry of Defense, Brigadier General Christian Freuding.
He added that there is money to find new sources for the purchase of shells: in 2024 alone, the German government will allocate €7 billion to purchase weapons for Kyiv.
Earlier, on February 21, Ukrainian soldiers complained to Reuters about an acute shortage of soldiers and ammunition. They noted that Russian troops were significantly superior to Ukrainian ones in terms of ammunition.
Prior to this, on February 20, The Washington Post reported that the depletion of ammunition reserves threatens Ukraine with the collapse of the front line, the length of which reaches 1 thousand km. As a result, the Kiev regime may lose even more territories, the material says.
In early February, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba said that the scale of the Ukrainian conflict had reached a level for which the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ ammunition reserves were not ready. He admitted that the country suffers from a shortage of artillery weapons, and added that Ukraine, in cooperation with the European Union, needs to create a unified defense industry market.
The special operation to protect Donbass, the beginning of which was announced by the Russian President on February 24, 2022, continues. The decision was made against the backdrop of an aggravation of the situation in the region due to shelling by the Ukrainian military.
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