Monitoring Desk
STOCKHOLM: Ukraine on Wednesday urged the European Union (EU) to ramp up promised ammunition supplies as defence ministers discussed plans to raid their stockpiles and place joint orders worth two billion euros of shells.
Ukraine’s Western allies warn that Kyiv is facing a critical shortage of howitzer shells as it fires thousands daily in its fight against a grinding Russian invasion.
EU defence ministers meeting with their Ukrainian counterpart Oleksiy Reznikov in Stockholm debated a three-pronged push to meet Kyiv’s immediate needs and strengthen Europe’s defence industry for the longer term.
“Our top priority is air defence systems, and ammunition, ammunition, and again ammunition,” Reznikov said as he arrived for the meeting.
As laid out by the European Union’s foreign policy service, the first part of the plan envisions using $1.06 billion (one billion euros) from the EU’s joint European Peace Facility to get member states to send shells in their stocks to Ukraine within weeks.
EU defence ministers debate aid for Ukraine
Ukraine’s European backers have already used up much of their supplies, committing some 12 billion euros of military support, with 3.6 billion euros coming from the joint fund.
There are questions about how many shells Europe can spare without leaving itself more vulnerable.
“Everyone agreed on the urgency because everybody agrees on the objective to support Ukraine as much as possible as quickly as possible,” the bloc’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said.
The second part of the strategy is to pool European Union, and Ukrainian demands to place massive joint orders that would incentivize European ammunition producers to ramp up their capacity.
Borrell proposed using another one billion euros that are already in the joint fund to cover Ukraine’s needs. That amount would exhaust the joint fund.
But the Ukrainian defence minister had earlier insisted that the figure was “insufficient because we need one million rounds, and approximately it should be four billion euros.”
Borrell hoped to agree on a firm plan to supply the ammunition to Ukraine by a meeting of foreign ministers on March 20.
Borrell backed using the European Union’s central defence agency to negotiate contracts.
However, some EU states fear that risks seeing the process get bogged down in bureaucracy and that countries with more experience should take the lead.
Sweden’s Defence Minister Pal Jonson said the top priority should be to use EU firms, but the bloc should not “exclude that possibility” of looking for ammunition elsewhere.
