No talk of peace but the weapons run dry
Following months of an unsuccessful counter-offensive by Ukrainian forces the Russians have now begun offensives around the towns of Avdiika and Kupyansk.
However the ability of the Ukrainians to fight back is getting hampered, not only by a lack of manpower, but that it’s allies are starting to run out of weapons, ammunition and artillery to send and what they can send is becoming of poorer quality.
This week the UK has admitted it’s its weapons arsenal is running low due to the large amounts of weaponry supplied to Ukraine over the last 18 months. Back in May, British General Rupert Jones admitted that the in the event of a war with Russia the UK would only only enough ammunition to fight for 72 hours before it would run out.
In February Sky News reported that a senior US general told then Defence Secretary Ben Wallace that the UK was becoming a second tier power due to its rapidly shrinking army which currently stands at around a measly 77,000 soldiers. The UK would struggle to field a modern war fighting division of some 25,000 to 30,000 soldiers yet it continues to turn its armed forces into a complete paper tiger due to arms supplies to Ukraine.
Reports of the shortage have come at an inconvenient time during the conflict as US funding has been held up amid wrangles over the budget in Congress.
A senior military source told The Telegraph;
We’ve given away just about as much as we can afford...We will continue to source equipment to provide for Ukraine, but what they need now is things like air defense assets and artillery ammunition and we’ve run dry on all that.
It’s been reported by front line troops that British Howitzers have fallen silent and soldiers have been reduced to firing the weapons less than once a day and some are resorting to using a WW2 era gun instead. Among them is an ancient 85mm D-44, a Soviet gun used in the final clashes of the Second World War.
Back in June The Telegraph reported in a rare almost admission of Russian success, that the Russian defence ministry had said that high-precision, long-range missiles had destroyed “an ammunition depot of foreign weapons transferred to Ukraine by Nato countries, including 155-mm M777 howitzers” near the town of Zolochiv, in the Lviv region.
At that time Jens Stoltenberg, the head of Nato, said there was an "urgent need" to step up arms deliveries to Ukraine, but warned that it took time to adapt Kyiv's forces to the latest generation of heavy weapons. He added:
So it is also a fact that when we now are actually starting the transition from Soviet-era weapons to more modern Nato weapons, there will also be some time needed to just make the Ukrainians ready to use and operate these systems.
The West has poured major supplies of arms into Ukraine to help it fight the Kremlin, but Kyiv complains it has only received a fraction of what it needs. The U.S. has been the largest provider of military assistance to Ukraine and has given Kyiv $44.5 billion since January 2021, when President Joe Biden took office. The U.K. is the world’s second-largest contributor to the war effort and has provided £4.6 billion in military assistance to Ukraine so far.
On October 5th British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has continued his predecessor Boris Johnson’s efforts to inflame tensions in the region, met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Granada. He said it is up to the West to give Ukraine what it needs to finish the job, he told reporters that the U.K. has led the way in support. He commented that;
We were the first country to send western battle tanks to Kyiv, now more than 10 others have followed. We were the first country to send long-range weapons to Kyiv, now France and the United States have followed. We were the first country to agree to train Ukrainian pilots, now more than a dozen others have followed. I say this to our allies: If we give President Zelensky the tools, the Ukrainians will finish the job.
This is a proxy war on the cheap for the West because it is overwhelmingly the Ukrainian people doing the fighting and the dying.
However, it is not just the UK that is running low on weapons - Rob Bauer, the Dutch admiral who chairs Nato’s Military Committee, told the Warsaw Security Forum recently that “the bottom of the barrel is now visible”.
“Miron”, an artillery commander stationed near Bakhmut, told The Telegraph:
The British L119 is a nice gun, very comfortable to work with and accurate to fire. But we don’t have enough shells for it – last week, we fired only five shells all week.
It is catastrophically limited. When we are in battle, we are having to weigh up very carefully whether we should use a shell or not.
These comments highlight a long-standing complaint from Ukraine that it is being outgunned in terms of artillery power by Russia, which uses up to 20,000 artillery shells a day on the battlefield. “We will be using bows and arrows next,” joked one of Miron’s comrades.
The UK’s biggest arms firm, BAE Systems, claims that it has plans to open an office in Ukraine to launch a joint weapons production partnership with local manufacturers. This is a farce as BAE know that any weapons factory it built would be a target for destruction by Russian missiles. It highlights that foreign policy is nothing more then an arms deal. One that we will all be paying for, for decades to come.