Those needs are already being felt.
“Ammunition stalling greatly impacts us on the battlefield,” said U.S. Army veteran Miro Popovich, a combat volunteer fighting in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region. Popovich, 34, said his unit was caught in heavy artillery fire a few weeks ago that lasted for two hours, but Ukrainian forces were unable to counter.
He suspects a shortage of ammunition was to blame. “We got out alive, but it left a little frustration that the enemy is able to do things like that unpunished,” Popovich said.
“It would have been great if American politicians stopped using Ukraine in pre-election games and just helped us to stop this great evil,” he added.
The most acute need right now is for artillery rounds, said Dara Massicot, a senior fellow with the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, but rationing is now occurring across many ammunition categories like tank rounds and rockets.
Another soldier serving in the infantry in the eastern Donbas region said that Ukrainian forces were aware of their heavy reliance on Western supplies and the dire future they faced with that support in doubt.
“Imagine a person injured in a car crash,” said the private, who goes by the call sign “Tatarin.”
“You have an option of either helping this person or wait a little until the medics arrive, and every minute for this person is their chance of survival,” he said. “It’s the same here. You can think about it for another week or two, but it all costs the lives of the soldiers on the front lines.”
The battle for Avdiivka — and beyond
The struggle Ukraine is facing has been evident in the fight for Avdiivka, a small eastern city that became the main flashpoint of the war over the winter.
The two sides fought over the battered town for months, but Russian forces seized it over the weekend. Avdiivka’s fall hands Putin a high-profile victory amid faltering Western support and ahead of his re-election next month. It…
Read the full article here