The exuberance that accompanied the start of Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive has soured into uncertainty. A recent TIME magazine piece on Zelensky paints a picture of a man struggling to battle impatience in his American allies and corruption in his own government. A day after that, the Economist published an interview with Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in which the general acknowledged that the war had reached a “stalemate.”
In retrospect, media hype had demanded more of Ukraine this summer than was realistically achievable. The reputation of the Russian army was in tatters after their fiascos at Kyiv and Kherson, and some of its most competent formations had just been consumed in frontal assaults against Bakhmut. All the while, Ukraine’s Western partners had begun to send increasingly sophisticated equipment, raising hopes that a combination of technological and moral superiority would be enough to push Russia out of Ukrainian territory. “British-made tanks are about to sweep Putin’s conscripts aside,” wrote one Telegraph columnist of the 14 Challenger 2 tanks that the UK had donated to Ukraine. “I expect what’s left of the Russian army to be nothing more than a speed bump on the way to liberating Crimea.” (READ MORE: The Naivete of American Foreign Policy)
Five months after that piece was penned, the burnt-out husks of Challengers and Leopards have now joined the thousands of other tank carcasses littering the Ukrainian steppe. The frontline remains virtually unchanged. Kyiv’s allies continue to state their unwavering support, but a degree of doubt has set in. Approval for continued aid to Ukraine among the American public is slipping, particularly with Republicans, and U.S. officials have begun quietly broaching the possibility of peace negotiations with Russia. In the TIME piece, Zelensky recalls congressmen asking him what would happen to Ukraine if American aid were to cease. “What happens is we will lose,” he says. On its present trajectory, Ukraine may struggle to stay in the war, to say nothing of pushing Russia back to its 2014 borders.
A Matter of Munitions in Ukraine
If Washington, D.C. is to continue supporting its allies, whether in Kyiv, Taipei, or elsewhere, a double recalibration is required: first of expectations, and then of munitions production.
Ukraine cannot be expected to fight like NATO while possessing only a fraction of NATO’s capabilities. That is to say, a large, strategically decisive breakthrough of the kind that the Ukrainians achieved around Kherson last year (when they substantially outnumbered the Russians), and which many anticipated for this summer, is no longer on the cards. In theory, recent donations of advanced weapons would have facilitated precisely such a breakthrough. In practice, the small numbers of most of these systems — 100 Storm Shadow missiles, 20 ATACMS missiles, and a few dozen Leopard 2s — delivered piecemeal over the course of several months, proved inadequate.
That is not to say that these weapons have had no effect. In particular, Ukraine’s access to long-range precision munitions has made life difficult for the Russians behind the frontline. Storm Shadow missiles have been used to great effect against Russian assets in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol, with two strikes in September, the first damaging multiple vessels, and the second wrecking the Russian Black Sea Fleet headquarters and killing scores of officers. More recently, ATACMS missiles were deployed against airbases deep in Russian territory.
Yet Ukraine has been unable to exploit Russian logistical chaos to the extent that NATO doctrine calls for. Therefore the cumulative effects of these strikes have been gradual and attritional rather than decisive: Russian officers who once mingled out in the open now meet in bunkers, extra expenses are incurred to keep parked planes separated and well-protected, and so on. Previously soft targets adapt and harden, and the war goes on. (READ MORE: Another GOP Fail: The Free Ride for Ukraine Nobody Will Take)
What is Ukraine and its allies to do? General Zaluzhnyi assesses: “In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other.” A revolution on the magnitude of gunpowder, or even the German panzer corps during World War 2, is probably not forthcoming. That leaves only a stalemate, or as Zaluzhnyi puts it, a “stupor,” in which thousands of men die over unmoving frontlines in scenes reminiscent of the Great War.
If NATO is to continue supporting Ukraine in such a fight, it will need to commit to quickly ramping up massive munitions production, particularly of artillery shells, cheap drones, and air defense systems. It will then need to sustain such production for the many years that this conflict may last.
Right now, Ukraine’s allies are coming up short. Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian artillery has fired an average of 5,000 to 6,000 rounds daily, in contrast to Russia, which fires about 20,000 daily but at times has managed over 60,000. This gap has remained despite the U.S. dipping into its stockpiles and the stockpiles of its allies, and even taking out a loan for 500,000 shells from South Korea, all to keep Ukraine resupplied. The roughly 3 million shells of various calibers that the U.S. has sent since February 2022 amounts to about 4,500 per day, or barely enough to sustain Ukraine’s current rate of fire.
As existing stockpiles run out, future aid packages will have to be scraped together from freshly produced shells. The U.S. currently produces about 24,000 155mm shells per month and is aiming for 1 million per year by the end of 2025. The EU currently produces 300,000 per year and aims to grow output to 650,000 in the near future. Assuming both America and Europe meet their goals, this would mean that Ukraine, assuming that it’s still fighting in 2025, will still be receiving about 4,500 shells per day. The Russians, on the other hand, will likely be able to produce about 2 million shells per year, outpacing the U.S. and EU combined, and will be able to tap Iran, North Korea, and possibly even China for resupply.
Needless to say, this ammunition gap is unsustainable, and maintaining the status quo amounts to condemning Ukraine to a slow death. The fact that Kyiv has fewer men to lose than Moscow makes it all the more vital that it compensates with a greater volume of fire.
Therefore, if NATO truly wants to commit to supporting Ukraine until 2025 and beyond, production must ramp up much more aggressively — at least doubling or tripling the current targets. It also means pushing down the cost of production, even if it means sacrificing some quality. A “good enough” artillery shell produced in Russia costs about $600, while a shell produced in Western Europe costs up to $6,000. Sustaining 10,000 shells per day at the Russian rate costs about $2.2 billion per year; at the EU rate, about $22 billion per year. It goes without saying that the former package would be easier to sell to voters than the latter.
Zero-Sum Game
Ukraine is not the only conflict on Uncle Sam’s plate, much to Zelensky’s chagrin. Hamas’s terrorist attacks, and the subsequent IDF response, have drawn the eyes of the world away from Eastern Europe. Yet these two conflicts are connected. Russian ally Iran has activated its proxies to threaten Israel, and the U.S. has responded by moving naval assets into the region. Undergirding the stretched ammunition situation, the U.S. has had to redirect artillery shells destined for Ukraine to Israel instead.
On the other side of the world, there is a third, even greater security concern. China’s ambitions in Taiwan threaten to spiral into a regional conflict that dwarfs the one in Ukraine. The People’s Liberation Army doctrine leans heavily into missiles: its Rocket Force branch (PLARF) is considered a branch on par with the Air Force and the Navy. China has attained a technological edge in a handful of areas of missile technology, with the Wall Street Journal describing it (and Russia) as “far ahead” of the U.S. in hypersonics.
If U.S. policymakers envision a war over Taiwan as a D-Day-style mass amphibious assault, then they are likely misreading the situation. Taiwan, as a densely populated and mountainous island, is among the most difficult invasion targets on Earth. But being an island also has its downsides. Taiwan is dependent on imports for about 70 percent of its food supply, compared to about 60 percent for Japan. Worse still, Taiwan’s import dependency ratio for energy is an incredible 98 percent. If Beijing decides to implement a kinetic blockade using its rocket forces to bring Taipei to heel, then electricity, water, and food would all begin running out in a matter of days to weeks. This would, of course, be the mother of all war crimes — but it’s probably not safe to bet on the Communist Party’s better angels.
If Taiwan is to avoid such a scenario, then its only option is to make itself too dangerous to attack. Simply put, this means having the ability to strike targets on the Chinese mainland in retaliation. It already has this capability to a limited extent, possessing several hundred of its own indigenously produced Hsiung Feng IIE missiles, as well as 11 HIMARS rocket launcher systems and 64 ATACMS missiles from a recent U.S. arms sale. But if the war in Ukraine is anything to go by, such a stockpile would only last a couple of months in an all-out shooting war, and with a kinetic blockade in place, resupply would be impossible.
The tanks, helicopters, and machine guns that the U.S. is supplying to Taiwan will almost certainly never see action even in the event of a war. But what the island democracy really needs — the ability to trade fires with the mainland — puts it in competition with Ukraine for American production capacity.
Win the War or End It
Ukrainians are determined to see this war through to its conclusion: 60 percent want to continue fighting until victory. The fact that this number remains so high despite the toll of the war is the ultimate refutation of Putin’s questioning of Ukrainian statehood.
But it must be said that the status quo, in which Ukraine is given just enough aid to continue fighting but not enough to win, is perhaps the worst of all possibilities. It would be unsurprising to find the war still in a stupor in half a decade, with the frontlines virtually unchanged but with another few hundred thousand soldiers lost or maimed on each side. Such an outcome would, of course, thoroughly degrade Russian power, but it would come at the cost of what remains of Ukraine’s fighting-age men. (RELATED: An Open Letter From Prominent Conservatives on Aid to Ukraine)
A decision must be made, and time is running out. Disapproval for continued aid to Ukraine has been rising steadily, particularly among Republicans, with a particularly large increase recently owing to the disappointing summer counteroffensive. If Washington, D.C. wants to help Ukraine win, it must make up its mind about the additional costs that would entail.
General Zaluzhnyi’s comparison of his country’s situation with the First World War is evocative. In the century since that war, it has come to be remembered, not for which border provinces changed hands, but for the catastrophic loss of life and for wrecking the belligerent countries for generations. If the Biden Administration cannot provide Ukraine with a clear path to victory, then it must pressure Kyiv to accept compromises for peace, for the sake of Ukrainians and the world.