Kirilo Budanov, head of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence services, warned in mid-October that if the Israeli military operation in Gaza lasted beyond a few weeks, the Ukrainian Armed Forces would have “a problem for sure.” A month later, its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, confirmed that the supply of ammunition to Israel, especially from the United States, has reduced arms transfers for its troops. “Our supplies have been reduced, that’s life, it’s normal when everyone is fighting for their survival, so are we,” Zelensky said Thursday in a meeting with the media.
“My priority is to get help from the West,” the president said, “because attention is turning to the Middle East and for other reasons, and without their support, we will go backwards.” The president stressed that it has been above all the shipment of 155 millimeter caliber ammunition, the one used by NATO howitzers serving in Ukraine, that has suffered “a real slowdown.” Zelensky expressed similar words in his meeting in Kiev, also on Thursday, with the new British Foreign Secretary, David Cameron: “The world is not focused on the situation on our war front, attention is divided and it does not help us at all. ”.
Ukraine is suffering from a serious ammunition deficit because the Western military industry cannot meet its daily rate of projectile consumption. In the most intense moments of the summer counteroffensive, Ukrainian artillery could consume in three days the equivalent of what the United States defense industry produces in a month. Valeri Zaluzhni, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, acknowledged in an article this November in The Economist that the new weapons production lines of its NATO partners will not be able to provide ammunition to kyiv at full capacity for at least a year.
The European Union committed to supplying Ukraine with one million artillery shells in one year, until the spring of 2024, but both the Ukrainian and German governments have already warned that it will be impossible: the arsenals of NATO partners are under minimum and these too must be recovered.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza was already a setback for kyiv from the first moment, when it was confirmed that the United States was stopping the agreed transfer to Ukraine of 300,000 projectiles that it had stored in Israel. Military analysts already warned in October that Ukraine could be harmed by the crisis in Gaza. 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 Ukraine’s.” The Republican Party, with a majority in the United States Congress, has blocked future military aid packages to Ukraine proposed by the White House because it considers that they are aimed at a war with no signs of a near outcome favorable to North American interests.
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Zelensky took advantage of the meeting with the press, as reported by Bloomberg, to reveal that his intelligence services have information that Moscow has launched a disinformation plan that seeks to divide Ukrainian society and provoke a coup against it. The president did not provide more details. The Ukrainian authorities have been denouncing for weeks that the pessimistic reports from the main international media about the situation on the front are partly fueled by Russian propaganda. Zaluzhni provoked unprecedented controversy in Ukraine during the war by admitting in The Economist that the front was stagnant and that there are no options to make major advances again to expel the Russian troops.
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