The European Union\u2019s goal of supplying Ukraine with 1 million rounds of artillery ammunition is unlikely to be achieved, Germany\u2019s defense minister said Tuesday, as Kyiv remains locked in a grinding war of attrition against Russia with winter approaching. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt can be assumed that the 1 million rounds will not be reached,\u201d Boris Pistorius said ahead of an EU defense ministers meeting in Brussels. EU member states are working with industry to ramp up production, he added. <\/p>\n
In\u00a0March, EU member states agreed to provide Ukraine with 1 million rounds of artillery ammunition for Ukraine to be delivered within 12 months. <\/p>\n
Pistorius\u2019 warning came a day after Josep Borrell, the EU\u2019s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy,\u00a0said the bloc may not meet targets for ammunition production to supply Kyiv <\/strong>by the end of the year, but said efforts were underway to increase production capacity. <\/p>\n In the short term, armies have been asked to provide ammunition from existing stocks, amounting to approximately 300,000 shots, Borrell said. <\/p>\n Borrell added that, on the production side, several contracts had been awarded, but it depends how quickly factories can produce the ammunition. <\/p>\n Both Ukraine and Russia need to replenish extraordinary amounts of ammunition as a grinding war of attrition continues in Ukraine\u2019s east and south.\u00a0According to South Korea\u2019s National Intelligence Service, North Korea has exported more than 1 million shells to Russia since early August. The\u00a0US has also been ramping up ammunition production to supply Ukraine. <\/p>\n Ukraine\u2019s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Kyiv urgently needed the EU to ramp up its ability to supply ammunition for the Ukrainian military. <\/p>\n Ukraine is \u201cringing the bells a lot and loudly\u201d over EU ammunition supply, he said on national television on Monday night. \u201cI believe that the reason for these issues is not the lack of political will in the EU to support Ukraine,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is such political will, but, let\u2019s say, [there is the] deplorable state of the defense industry that is capable of producing a sufficient number of shells, and warehouses, and the ability to conclude foreign contracts. <\/p>\n Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine, Western allies have been openly concerned about their ability to provide Kyiv with the amount of ammunition it requires \u2013 and their ability to manufacture fast enough to replenish dwindling stocks. <\/p>\n Western manufacturing of conventional ammunition went into decline following the end of the Cold War, as countries focused instead on modern equipment. Very few seriously believed another large-scale land war would take place in Europe. <\/p>\n This \u201cdressing the shop window\u201d approach helps us understand why European countries had low ammunition stocks going into the Ukraine conflict, but doesn\u2019t explain why things didn\u2019t dramatically improve in the year that followed. <\/p>\n \u201cNo private company that is answerable to shareholders will have kept staff and maintained large capacity to produce equipment that people are not buying, so it will be difficult to meet a sudden surge in demand in the short to medium term,\u201d Waldwyn added. <\/p>\n\n The European Union\u2019s goal of supplying Ukraine with 1 million rounds of artillery ammunition is unlikely to be achieved, Germany\u2019s defense minister said Tuesday, as Kyiv remains locked in a grinding war of attrition against Russia with winter approaching. \u201cIt can be assumed that the 1 million rounds will not be reached,\u201d Boris Pistorius said <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11598,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11597","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} \u2018Ringing the bells\u2019<\/h2>\n