Foreign Minister Kuleba warns of increased challenges on front lines due to lack of ammunition
The current situation on the front lines of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine may be even more dire than at the start of the war, due to a lack of ammunition, Ukraine’s Foreign Affairs Minister Dmytro Kuleba said in an interview with German newspaper Bild, published on Jan. 23.
A Russian mass missile strike on the morning of Jan. 23, comprised of over 40 missiles, is evidence that Ukraine needs more air defense systems and more munitions for existing systems, Kuleba noted.
"Although Ukraine has significantly increased production and will continue to do so, we still see that the Western defense industry is not able to produce enough,” he said.
Kuleba added that Ukraine's munition needs don’t correspond to the needs of Western countries, meaning that ammunition supplies to Ukraine are unlikely to impact donors defense capabilities.
Ukrainian counteroffensive : news and numbers
Ukrainian officials announced a counteroffensive by the Armed Forces of Ukraine during the spring of 2023, around the time a “tank coalition” was announced by Ukraine’s partners to supply the country with modern Western-made battle tanks.
The Ministry of Defense announced that it was switching to offensive actions in some areas along the frontline and reported "certain successes" of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) in the Zaporizhzhya sector in early June 2023.
Meanwhile, Western media outlets began reporting that Ukraine had launched a counteroffensive, noting that the AFU had launched a number of attacks in the southeast of the country. These reports were accompanied by significant losses in military equipment.
The AFU liberated several settlements on the border of Zaporizhzhya and Donetsk regions in June 2023. The Ukrainian military was conducting a "preparatory formational operation” the Ministry of Defense said and stated that "the main strike was still ahead."
Western media outlets at the same time reported that the progress of the AFU was "behind schedule," because the Russians had been able to reinforce their defense lines. The progress was "slower than we would like," President Zelenskyy admitted.
At the end of July 2023, various outlets reported that Ukraine had changed the tactics being used in the counteroffensive, after some failures to make headway in the initial assaults.
The commander-in-chief of the AFU, Valerii Zaluzhnyi, backed out of the original plan – per The Washington Post – only four days into the counteroffensive.
The failures of the Ukrainian counteroffensive became more and more widely discussed in the fall, due to the absence of significant breakthroughs by the AU at the front over the past few months.
Ukraine was disappointed that some allies underestimated the size of the frontline and the strength of Russian defenses that they built up for more than a year, according to U.S. financial news newspaper Bloomberg, and this had hindered the counteroffensive.
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