In recent years, Ukraine has faced difficulties in the field of armaments, which may negatively affect its defense capability and security. According to Foreign Policy, Ukraine will continue to fall behind Russia in arms, including artillery, throughout 2024.
An employee of the US congressional staff told the newspaper on the condition of anonymity that this year the Ukrainians "will mostly take a defensive position", because even after the allocation of financial aid, most of the weapons that Ukraine needs will not get to the front. This pause is due to the fact that the Biden administration will spend most of 2024 restoring the US's own stockpiles to pre-war levels.
According to the American official, the Armed Forces will primarily need cluster munitions for defense, and the United States will send them soon. But they have all been stored there since the Cold War and have a high failure rate, with deadly consequences for civilians.
In addition, Foreign Policy notes that American and European projectile factories are "just starting to work at double capacity", so the Ukrainians "will spend most of 2024 digging defensive trenches, as in previous months", but it is unlikely that these fortifications will turn out to be so as effective as Russian echelon defense.
Also, most of the ammunition from the 1.4 million shells promised to Ukraine by the EU will not be delivered until the end of 2024. European officials say that it is 30% cheaper to restore old artillery ammunition than to buy new ones, but most of them are stored in warehouses of former Soviet satellites, which do not want to spoil relations with the Russian Federation.
"Ukrainians will be able to fire approximately 75,000 to 85,000 projectiles each month... this is the minimum that Ukraine needs to conduct defensive operations.
There are no opportunities for Ukraine to conduct offensive actions this year,"
says the British analyst Franz-Stefan Heidi, who calculated in his recent study how many shells the Armed Forces of Ukraine spend.
At the same time, Russia is already starting to produce 3.5 million shells in 2024, and it is quite possible that it will be able to increase production to 4.5 million ammunition by the end of the year, the publication writes.
