Fear and Hoarding on Ukraine’s Eastern Front

A soldier bolted round the corner, face puce from a mixture of exertion and embarrassment, keys jangling in his hands as he wheezed his way over to the warehouse door.

Valerii was a beekeeper before the war, and he was built better for apiculture than he was for distance-running.

“I’m checking in regularly on some abandoned hives near the front lines” he told me, via my translator. “It looks like it will be a big harvest this year,” he said with a smile as he prepared several mugs of tea for his colleagues.

But despite his jolliness, the situation that lay behind that locked door was far starker than any Western leader has been willing to admit on record. As I entered the ammunition warehouse, I was startled by how barren it was.

We were visiting a stretch of front in eastern Ukraine, where Foreign Policy was invited to embed with some of the troops tasked with holding the line against relentless Russian combined-arms offensives. For the safety of the men who spoke to us, names have been changed, and their operating locations are not being disclosed.

It was late March. Ukraine’s frozen steppe had thawed in the spring, and the sun was beating down on the front lines of Europe. It had been six weeks since the fall of Avdiivka, a town in the Donetsk region that had about 30,000 residents before the war, and while the Russian offensives had not let up, Ukraine’s defensive lines had stabilized since they withdrew from Avdiivka’s meat grinder.

Yet the ammunition shortages that began in 2023 are taking their toll on Ukraine’s war effort. U.S. aid to Ukraine remains blockaded in Congress by a far-right Republican Party caucus, and Europe has failed to meet Ukraine’s demand for artillery shells.

News that a Czech artillery scheme has managed to source up to a million rounds of artillery for Ukraine was greeted with a sigh of relief in Kyiv, but there on the forward operating line, there was still little sign of a resupply. The Czech plan is not expected to begin deliveries until June, and a similar Estonian offer will likely follow soon after.

On the front lines, though, the situation is already critical as Ukrainian forces struggle to hold their positions without the ammunition required to defend them.

A soldier picks up used metal artillery shell casings at a former gun position as Ukraine’s military navigates a severe shortage of ammunition, seen at an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Feb. 16. Scott Peterson/Getty Images

Around us were two dozen or so wooden boxes of artillery ammunition, holding a total of 30 NATO-standard 122 mm shells, obtained from Pakistani stocks, and 60 Soviet 122 mm rounds from what little remains of Ukraine’s dwindling stockpile.

The brigade that I was embedded with held a stretch of front 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) long, and when I visited this axis, they had nine functioning artillery pieces, each with a maximum range of 15 kilometers (about 9 miles). That effectively amounted to 10 rounds per howitzer for every 2 kilometers of front line, with no resupplies expected soon.

Startled by the numbers, I asked Vladislav how the Ukrainian soldiers had managed to stabilize the front after Avdiivka, given that they had such little ammunition to work with.

“Because of the lack of shells, we have to pay with lives,” he said, making it clear that the price paid for Western inaction on artillery is being paid for in Ukrainian blood.

I asked what the ratio of fire between them and the Russians currently was, and Vladislav delivered another grim assessment.

“On the good days, between 10- and 20-to-1” he said, “and on the bad days, it almost feels like they have an unlimited supply.”

This part of the front has not seen as many Russian offensives as other parts of the eastern forward line, but the ammunition shortages are impacting the entirety of Ukraine’s war effort.

Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of the U.S. European Command, told the House Armed Services Committee on April 10th that Russia would be outgunning Ukraine by 10 to one “within a matter of weeks.” For some units at least, this point has already been reached.

A Ukrainian gunner removes a smoking shell casing after firing a howitzer at Russian positions in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Feb. 18. Scott Peterson/Getty Images

They have not received a resupply in months, and his brigade has been forced to ration shells, firing only when absolutely necessary to hold their positions. The only reason that Vladislav’s troops have not been forced into further retreat, he told me, has been solely the “professionalism and sacrifice of Ukrainian men.”

“Without the ammunition, we have to rely on our reserves,” he said, adding that this reality has come with “heavy cost in life.”

Ukrainians are still the more motivated troops, he told me, as they are the ones defending their land. But the Russians have greatly improved their tactics since their early failures in the war.

“They build defenses, then they advance, then they build defenses, then they advance again,” Vladislav said.

In the meantime, Ukrainians have been much slower to fortify their positions, providing further openings for Russian gains while ammunition supply remains critical.

But despite his harsh words about the offensive, Vladislav had no harsh words for his superiors on this salient, and he praised new commander in chief Oleksandr Syrskyi’s organized retreat from Avdiivka as the “correct decision.”

But based on Kyiv’s talk about the potential for a new counteroffensive later this year, an offensive seems unlikely. “Offensive?” Vladislav asked. “We cannot even hold our current positions.”

Without a significant increase in their ammunition supplies, Vladislav told me that his men will be forced to abandon this line and retreat farther into Ukrainian territory. He said that they need at least a 3-to-1 shell advantage over the enemy to be able to adequately counter them.

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Across an entire front line, that is far more ammunition than even the Czech and Estonian initiatives can provide. According to former Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine needs at least 356,400 shells a month to remain operational. The Czech supply would provide just three months of this.

I asked Vladislav if there was anything besides shells that he needed, and he stressed that the issue was not just about ammunition, but also equipment.

“I need new artillery,” he said. With most of their howitzers built in the 1980s, his troops’ equipment is under increasing strain and in need of constant maintenance. But Vladislav insisted that his men do not need additional training to use newer, NATO-standard armored vehicles.

“If I drive an old Lada, it’s easy for me to then drive a Mercedes,” he said with a smile.

It is not, at least, all bad news for this particular unit, though.

“We have 100 percent of our personnel needs met,” said Vladislav. “I have too many men and not enough artillery pieces for them.” He told me that he has enough spare crew to man three more cannons, but he lacks the cannons to man.

The men also remained in high spirits. Those that I spoke to said that their morale and will to fight was still strong, but the situation had clearly been taking its toll on them.

Oleh, the driver of his unit’s worse-for-wear looking 2S1 Gvozdika—a Soviet-made, self-propelled Howitzer—told me that the recent weeks had been unbearably tense, but that he and the unit remained strong. “If we were provided with shells, we would be prepared for offensives, but we don’t have them,” he said. “The only thing we are thinking about is saving shells.”

“Our main target is enemy infantry,” said Serhii, another soldier.  Without ammunition, the Ukrainian soldiers no longer have any ability to operate counter-battery fire in this part of the front line, leaving their positions totally at the mercy of Russian artillery. “We shell their infantry only to prevent them from advancing—we have no shells for anything else,” he added.

The worst thing, they told me, aside from Russian shelling and  drone attacks, was listening to their comrades being killed over the radio. “We listen to their suffering, and we feel useless,” said Oleh, a tank driver.

The men clearly have a Western audience in mind as they talk to me. Taras, the oldest of the men, told me that if he could speak to the U.S. politicians currently blocking military aid packages to Ukraine, he would ask them to come and see how critical the situation is.

“These politicians should come and fight alongside me” he said. “Then they will see for themselves.”

“If we don’t get the shells to push them back, they will come after you next” Serhii said.

Oleh followed up: “If we don’t fight them back, then NATO will be left to fight Russia.”

A soldier carries a shell to load a gun at an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Feb. 18. Scott Peterson/Getty Images

Kyiv has begun to change its approach from the strategy that yielded little territorial gain in 2023, starting to build trenches, other fortifications, and defensive lines. The fresh defenses that I saw in the Sumy region, an area in northeast Ukraine that borders Russia and was one of the first regions invaded in 2022, showed that Ukraine was actively preparing for a worst-case scenario, even in areas completely liberated from Russian presence, to thwart the potential for another Russian invasion from the north of the country.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky published photographs of an official visit to those same defenses in Sumy just four days later. Kyiv is keen to let the Russians know about the fortifications, presumably hoping to deter future offensives.

Yet the situation in the neighborhoods of these border regions is bleak, and the authorities have no option but to evacuate entire villages and towns, as Russia routinely shells them from across the border. One of the towns that we visited had been almost completely emptied, save for a small band of police officers sheltering in an underground bunker from the relentless shelling aboveground.

The images that will stay with me the longest were taken in one of the morgues of Sloviansk, a city in the Donetsk region. On the day we visited, four bodies had been brought back from the front line, and all but one had been killed within the past 48 hours. Three of them had been killed by bullet wounds to the chest, a brutal reminder that this war is not only being fought at artillery range. One of the soldiers died from a leg wound; Ukrainian troops were simply not able to evacuate him in time to provide medical attention, and he was left to slowly bleed out in the arms of his comrades.

This was just one morgue of several in this area, on one day, in one city bordering Ukraine’s eastern front.

This is the price being paid by the people defending Ukraine. Much of the Ukrainian blood being spilled here is on the hands of the Western politicians who block military aid in the service of domestic political games. Ukrainians are paying with their lives for every day that ammunition is left gathering dust in Western stockpiles.

Before I left, I asked Vladislav if he had a message for Ukraine’s allies.

He said, simply, “We can stop this disease here, but only if you provide us with the shells.”