Ukraine is losing the artillery war against Russia in the east of the country and has already used up almost all its ammunition, depending solely on what the West provides it to try to avoid losing the Donbass region.
The statement was made by Vadim Skibitski, the deputy head of Kiev’s military intelligence, in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, and sheds light on the Ukrainian government’s growing anxiety about the military and political reality of the war initiated by Vladimir Putin. on February 24th.
“This is an artillery war now, and we’re losing in terms of artillery. It all depends now on what [os paÃses da Otan, aliança militar ocidental] give us. Ukraine has 1 artillery piece for every 10 or 15 Russians [no Donbass]. And our western partners already gave us about 10% of what they had,” he said.
The description matches the account of fighting in the Severodonetsk region, the last major city in Lugansk province that has not yet fallen into Russian hands. At the current rate, they will soon take over the site’s ruin, leaving 30% to 40% of the other area that makes up Donbass, Donetsk, left to conquer as Putin promised.
Before the war, according to the reference inventory of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), Ukraine had 1,818 artillery pieces, including 354 multiple rocket launchers, all of Soviet origin.
According to the Russian balance sheet, up to Thursday (9) 1,843 pieces have been destroyed, including 499 launchers, a number higher than the number available before the conflict. Even considering the likely exaggeration, this shows a difficult situation on the field.
This is where the political component comes in. Ukrainians have been screaming louder and louder about the fatigue identified in the West with the war, visible in statements here and there by officials or experts suggesting that it is time to find an accommodation with Putin.
President Volodymyr Zelensky vocalizes this over and over, as he did on Thursday, when he doubled the estimate of soldiers killed in the Donbass to 200 daily. That’s a lot, even with the full mobilization of the country’s 18-60 year old male force.
In the first phase of the war, when Russian arrogance in trying to scare Kiev by attacking on several fronts without sufficient force was punished, Western light weapons were instrumental: portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles held back armored columns without light infantry support.
The embarrassment has prompted Moscow to reorganize itself towards a more restrained goal they call “liberation of Donbass” – Russian-speaking territory partly controlled by Russian separatists since the outbreak of a civil war in 2014.
According to the Ukrainian military, the war is consuming 5,000 to 6,000 rounds a day. “We’ve used up almost all of our ammunition and now we’re on NATO standard 155mm bullets,” Skibitski said.
Despite the crucial advantage for a war of attrition, the Russians also appear to be having problems. According to a military analyst consulted by the Sheetwho requested anonymity, the assessment is current among his peers that Moscow has spent a very large amount of high-precision missiles and that the use of older stockpiles of Soviet weapons is growing.
Nobody knows the scale of the issue, state secret that it is. The analyst heard between 50% and 60% of the warehouses emptied, which is a problem because in the event of an expansion of the conflict, Russia would be unguarded.
Kiev estimates that the Russians have dropped more than 2,100 cruise, ballistic and air-to-ground missiles on its territory in the nearly four months of war. Skibitski says between 10 and 14 units are still used daily.
But in the war in Donbass, which because of the more open terrain features artillery as its main weapon, the military says he noticed the more intensive use of H-22 rockets, Soviet models from the 1970s. Even tanks on the ground show this reality: There are increasing reports and images of the use of T-62s, outdated Soviet armored vehicles that were stored in Russia.
Kiev has received self-propelled and static howitzers from NATO, but in a number considered insufficient. As the official says, in any case today the war in Donbass is between American and Western weapons against the Russians, something that always puts the conflict on the reckless path of escalation.
Zelensky complains about half measures. The Americans, for example, were heavily criticized in Moscow for providing modern, medium-range multiple-launch rocket systems. But only four units will be transferred, and it should still be about three weeks before Ukrainians learn to use them. So does the British pledge to supply similar weapons.
On the other hand, as Skibitski said, Westerners are giving up a significant chunk of their arsenal. In the Polish and Czech cases, countries interested in the proximity of the Russian threat, there are already calls for help to reinforce the arsenal with material from more western NATO countries.
