Ukraine Is Still Outgunned by Russia

Ukraine is still likely to be outgunned by Russian artillery for much of the rest of 2024 despite Congress nearing the passage of a $60 billion military aid bill for Kyiv, officials and analysts told Foreign Policy, as both the United States and Europe ramp up production of NATO-standard rounds and restock their own arsenals.

For months, Ukrainian troops have been firing about 2,000 rounds a day, barely enough to sustain a defensive war against the Russians. And even with the approval of new U.S. aid, most factories have yet to ramp up production.

“The problem is there is a huge shortage—worldwide—of artillery shells,” said Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian lawmaker. “The Europeans said they would provide us a million shells—they provided only 30 percent of those. The Americans have dried out their stocks, and they’re also delivering to Israel. And they are only ramping up the production line.” 

The congressional seal of approval, expected to come Tuesday or Wednesday, will mean that the Biden administration can begin to replenish the U.S. Defense Department’s stockpiles of ammunition that the United States might need to fight a war of its own someday, thereby allowing the White House enough leeway to begin sending artillery to the Ukrainians from storehouses in Europe without harming U.S. military readiness. Reuters reported that the Biden administration is preparing a $1 billion package that will include artillery, rockets, and lots of vehicles.

But the expectation is that the administration will spend much of the year rebuilding U.S. stockpiles to prewar levels as the U.S. Army aims to level up artillery production to 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025. 

Across the Atlantic Ocean, Europe’s stockpiles are empty. Most of the output from the European Union’s initiative to get 1.4 million shells into Ukrainian hands—about half of which have already been delivered—won’t get there until the end of 2024. So Ukraine’s partners on the continent are searching under the couch cushions and looking for suppliers outside the European bloc to find enough artillery to keep Kyiv’s gun barrels hot.

The Czech Republic appears to have sourced enough money from a consortium of European countries to buy 500,000 rounds of 155 mm artillery ammunition and is currently working on getting the first batch to Ukraine. The Estonian government, which also has an initiative to crowdfund artillery shells for the Ukrainians, has not started fundraising. 

Refurbishing old artillery ammunition is about 30 percent cheaper than buying new shells, European officials said, but much of it comes from former Soviet satellite countries that aren’t keen to be on the Kremlin’s bad side. 

“I think it’s fair to assume that the Ukrainians for the next 12 months will be able to have a monthly fire rate of maybe roughly 75,000 to 85,000 [shells] per month, which boils down to something like 2,400 to 2,500 rounds per day,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, an associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London who conducted a study recently examining Ukraine’s rate of artillery fire. 

Gady said that is about the minimum amount that Ukraine needs to sustain a defensive war against the Russians. “That doesn’t leave any room for offensive operations this year,” Gady added. And congressional critics of U.S. aid to Ukraine—such as Sen. J.D. Vance, who argued in the New York Times this month that the United States simply doesn’t have “the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war”—are going to continue to make that case loudly. 

In the meantime, Russia is on track to produce 3.5 million rounds in 2024 and might be able to surge to produce 4.5 million rounds by the end of the year. But there are questions as to whether Russia is starting to max out its industrial capacity. The Kremlin can’t extend working hours—their weapons shops are already working around the clock—so European officials expect that Russia will have to build more factories to produce the shells that it needs. Russia is also getting artillery shells from North Korea and Iran, but some of them are so old that they’re misfiring. 

The hope is that by the beginning of 2025, the United States and European defense companies will be producing shells on a significant enough scale to put the Ukrainians on the front foot again. Without enough shells, the Ukrainians have been using first-person-view drones instead, which can be taken down with jamming equipment and can’t fly at night. 

The Ukrainians are trying to juke the numbers in their favor by getting more high-explosive rounds, which some see as a key defensive weapon as they try to stave off Russian assaults across the 600-mile-long front line. “The Ukrainians are basically committed to largely being on the defensive this year,” a congressional aide told Foreign Policy on condition of anonymity to talk about the situation on the battlefield. “Cluster munitions are … a top five defensive weapon as they’re trying to marshal their forces.”

Every round of dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, known as DPICMs in military parlance, is about four to five times more deadly than a conventional artillery round, the congressional aide said. There are about 3 million DPICM rounds in U.S. arsenals, dating all the way back to the Cold War—and the Biden administration has the authority to send $500 million worth more of the rounds and is likely to approve them soon—but the weapons have high “dud” rates, meaning they don’t always go off when fired and can be left behind for civilians to encounter, often with deadly consequences.

CNN reported this week that the Biden administration is also expected to provide the Ukrainians with long-range U.S. Army Tactical Missile Systems for the first time. But with U.S. and European factories just starting to work double time to get themselves—and the Ukrainians—the weapons they need, Kyiv is expected to spend much of 2024 digging defensive trenches, as it has been doing for months.

It’s not clear those fortifications will be as effective as the multitiered Russian lines that blunted Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, though.

“Ukraine is developing fortifications. They are building a defense depth,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia program who last traveled to Ukraine in November. “But the problem is when you have this manpower problem and ammunition problem at same time, it creates issues.”

And as production ramps up, Ukraine may be losing more troops that it can’t replace. “It took people two years to actually realize you need to invest in the defense industry,” Ustinova said.