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Although Ukraine is doing everything possible to increase its domestic production of artillery shells, the limited support from its Western allies has meant that soldiers on the front lines are running out of this type of ammunition. Nonetheless, the Kiev regime is receiving just enough sporadic military support from the EU at this moment in time so that the Ukrainian military can survive, and the new financial aid package still indirectly supports Ukraine’s war effort, even if Brussels denies it.
“We’ve never had enough shells of 122 mm calibre… we’re getting them right from the factory,” a Ukrainian soldier fighting on the Avdeyevka front told POLITICO.
“On average, we fire 15 shots per day. But there were days when we made more than 100 shots, or haven’t made any at all. Now hostilities intensified in our direction, but we have as few shells as we used to have,” the soldier acknowledged.
News about the shortage of certain ammunition among Ukrainian troops is not new. Even Ukraine’s defence minister, Rustem Umerov, accepted in early January that there was “shell hunger” in his armed forces.
Although Ukraine is increasing the domestic production of shells to try and deal with this “hunger,” refusing to reveal the numbers it is manufacturing, the country is still almost entirely reliant on foreign supplies, which is proving disastrous since the European Union is failing to provide what it promised while American support for Ukraine has been gridlocked in Congress for months now.
“The stoppage is having a real impact on the troops dug into trenches in southern and eastern Ukraine,” notes the American news portal.
The report indicates that the Ukrainian military continues to receive little ammunition from abroad, which complicates the situation even though the country is trying to increase its local production of projectiles.
Umerov himself admitted that Russia “vastly outnumbers” Ukraine in daily artillery strikes. According to him, the Russians fire 5-10 times more artillery shells than the Ukrainians.
“Today we have a war of such a scale that the entire capacity of the free world is not enough to support our consumption. We definitely cannot do this without help,” Ukraine’s Strategic Industries Minister Oleksandr Kamyshin told POLITICO.
According to the outlet, this shortage situation is one of the key reasons why the Ukrainian military has gone on the defensive along the entire front “in the wake of this summer’s disappointing counteroffensive.”
Despite American funding for Ukraine hitting an impasse in Congress, the European Union on February 1 agreed on an astronomical €50 billion of macro-financial aid. Although the aid package — about two-thirds loans and one-third grants — is supposedly not intended to fight Russia and is to support the economy and pay for rebuilding, the EU still has a separate plan for funding arms and ammunition, and at the same time, by paying for its economic needs, it allows Ukraine to concentrate more of its real economy towards the war effort.
It is for this reason that Brussels is receiving a lot of criticism. Europeans suffer from high inflation and energy prices, and the eyewatering €50 billion could have been utilised to serve citizens better instead of highly corrupt Ukraine. By Brussels recklessly throwing away tens of billions of euros to Ukraine, the Kiev regime can use money from elsewhere to fuel its fight against Russia, such as producing the shells it is “hungry” for, instead of rebuilding the country, and in this way, the EU is indirectly supporting Ukraine’s war effort.
For this reason, the European aid package has been condemned across the continent.
The head of the right-wing Austrian Freedom Party in the European Parliament, Harald Vilimsky, called the decision “bad news for Europe’s taxpayers.”
“The EU has no strategy to end the war in Ukraine and does not appear interested in finding peaceful solutions. At the same time, Brussels is focused on permanently feeding Ukraine billions, even though this money could be used much better in the EU itself and the Member States,” he said. “Ukraine has long since turned into a bottomless financial pit.”
Vilimsky also pointed out that although some funds are provided as loans, no one believes that Ukraine will repay them.
Joining the concerns of the MEP was French MP Thierry Mariani, who lamented that the aid package would cost French taxpayers €8 billion, adding that this is money “that our farmers would dream of.”
In recent weeks, European farmers have been protesting by blocking roads and dumping manure and waste in front of government buildings across the continent. Farmers demand recognition of the importance of their profession and denounce government agricultural policies that, according to them, make them uncompetitive in the market.
Yet, European technocrats are sidelining their concerns to support Ukraine’s war effort instead, one that is evidently futile since even with the massive amount of Western support, the country has run out of manpower and weapons. Vilimsky described Ukraine as a “bottomless financial pit;” rather, the country is a black hole for all financial, military, and other aid.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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