tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
If they go in to Gaza on the ground, they’ll need massive amounts of supplies.
Current Affairs Ukraine
- Thread starter Mutzo Nutzo
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If they go in to Gaza on the ground, they’ll need massive amounts of supplies.
Main items on shopping list for Israel are re-supply of Tamir missiles for their Iron dome systems and MK84’s + JDAM kits.
US are mainly supplying MK82’s to Ukraine and also Ukraine doesn’t have Iron Dome so I can’t see any issues there.
There could be an issue in relation to 5.56 ammo but other NATO countries should be picking up the slack for Ukraine on that
Tennessee Blue Mike
Player Valuation: £50m
Everything I am hearing is missiles for the Iron Dome for watching missiles raining down from Lebanon.
Tipp blue
If I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.
Packed up all his stuff and moved to Russia, he applied to join the army yesterday, he got his traning finished this afternoon and is off to Bakhmut later tonight with a rifle from 1962.
Tennessee Blue Mike
Player Valuation: £50m
Boy they need him. Surely in the PR department
Yarrgh
Player Valuation: £80m
Got a ticket to Russia and ended up in Rusholme. It will be OK though, he's got a flight to St Petersburg tomorrow. He didn't even realise Russia had conquered Florida, but y'know, nostrovia and all that.
Must have had a dodgy Skype connection when booking his flights
What, Russians raping kids snd women again?
Spadge Vernacular
Player Valuation: £70m
Spadge Vernacular
Player Valuation: £70m
This feels a lot closer.
I have to say, that this thread has become a lot more civilised, since @Kev The Rat got conscripted.
Yarrgh
Player Valuation: £80m
The travel agent didn't know the correct word for connecting flight in their language.
Cool_Blue
Player Valuation: £35m
The SMO is still on track according to Kev & Dave
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Good talker like...
Has zero clout now, which is why he's advocating stepping it up over red lines.
davek
Player Valuation: £150m
Financial Times:
‘Bottom of barrel’: Ukraine’s counteroffensive at risk from US aid delays
Ben Hall, Europe editor
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s appearance at Nato on Wednesday to plead for more weapons for Ukraine underscored Kyiv’s concern about dwindling allied support following Republican opposition in Washington and as attention is diverted to Israel’s war against Hamas.
Given its large stockpiles and greater industrial capacity, the US has played a vital role in rapidly supplying Ukraine with modern weaponry, particularly artillery ammunition and air defence.
Even a temporary pause in its support could start to impinge on Kyiv’s war strategy and tactics within weeks, analysts say, potentially curtailing Ukraine’s grinding counteroffensive, relieving the pressure on Russian forces and giving them the opportunity to reconstitute their combat power.
Despite the recent Republican-led block to Ukraine funding, the Joe Biden administration has pledged to back Kyiv for as long as it takes. Large bipartisan support, barring a small but powerful bloc of GOP outliers in Congress, is expected to eventually push the aid along.
But even a few weeks of delay could have an impact on the sputtering counteroffensive.
Max Bergmann, director of the Europe programme at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the roadblock to further military and financial aid erected by a minority of Republicans in the US House of Representatives was unlikely to have an immediate impact.
“But in another few weeks . . . if nothing has really changed in Congress, I think that will impact their battlefield decisions. And it will definitely impact their kind of planning as they go into the winter and spring.”
At the meeting of defence ministers in Brussels on Wednesday, Zelenskyy was at pains to explain it was not only the fate of the counteroffensive that was at stake. “A counteroffensive is one direction, but you also need to defend yourself, because on the other side is Russia, a large army of terrorists.”
Given the uncertainty over US military supplies, it was “inevitable” that Ukraine would have to rethink its tactics and strategy, said Mick Ryan, a former Australian army major-general who follows the war closely. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine’s top military commander, would be preparing for a worst-case scenario, Ryan added.
The Pentagon still has about $5bn to spend under already approved presidential drawdown authority, which allows Biden to tap US weapons stockpiles. That is enough for several months at current rates of outlay. The administration has used the facility to equip Ukraine with nearly $25bn of weaponry and support services.
CQ Brown, the US’s top general, on Wednesday said Washington had equipment deliveries planned until at least January 1 2024. He said the combined commitments of the US and its allies would allow Ukraine to keep its plans intact. “I don’t see that their plans will change,” Brown said.
A further $9.4bn has been spent on procurement contracts for Ukraine under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, mostly on artillery ammunition, air defence interceptors, precision long-range rockets and armoured vehicles. Many of the contracts will not yet have been fulfilled, leaving Kyiv with a longer-term pipeline of supplies.
But there is no money left in that fund until Congress appropriates more money — which could affect longer-term planning, defence officials said.
The war between Israel and Hamas could also prove a double-edged sword for Kyiv. Ukraine and Israel may end up competing for certain types of US support, including artillery ammunition and air defence interceptors.
Some US officials said this would not be the case immediately because the US had already committed $3.8bn in lethal aid to Israel. The primary Israeli need currently is interceptors for its short-range Iron Dome system, which Ukraine does not have.
“We can do both and we will do both,” US defence secretary Lloyd Austin said on Wednesday.
On the other hand, White House officials and congressional leaders are considering combining aid for Israel and for Ukraine in a single funding request, which could conceivably open a way to extending help to Kyiv.
However, that route is far from guaranteed. The risk is that as the impasse in Washington continues, the Ukrainian army starts to scale back its use of US-supplied munitions and weapons systems in anticipation of shortfalls.
“If the spigot turns off, it is not an immediate transformation of what we give to the Ukrainians,” said Dara Massicot, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But what will happen is this: rationing.”
Given Russia’s heavy fortifications, deep minefields and drone surveillance, Ukraine’s counteroffensive hinges on using artillery to chew through enemy positions faster than they can be rebuilt. To this end, Ukraine is expending 6,000-7,000 artillery rounds a day.
“If they feel they are not going to get anymore, they’ll hold back and that will bring the counteroffensive to a halt,” Massicot said. “Disruptions to aid for even a few weeks can lead to losses and setbacks.”
US artillery stockpiles are running low, forcing Washington to send controversial cluster munitions to Ukraine instead. The US is aiming to boost 155mm shell production capacity from 28,000 month to 60,000 next year and 100,000 by summer 2025.
The EU could theoretically plug a gap in financial and economic aid to Ukraine, but on weapons it is a different matter.
At the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Europe countries had depleted inventories and low production capacity. Rob Bauer, the Dutch admiral who is chair of Nato’s military committee, told the Warsaw Security Forum last week that in Europe “the bottom of the barrel is now visible”.
Capitals are slowly beginning to restock. The EU has earmarked €3bn to provide shells for Ukraine and to fill inventories. A senior official said the EU was on track to hit its goal of sending Ukraine 1mn artillery shells this year, but it is unclear how many of these are coming from new production.
If the Ukrainians were not confident about continued supplies of shells, cluster munitions or mortar rounds they might be forced to pull back to defensive positions, said Bergmann of CSIS. “So it really will reshape the war for them and in a way that I think, is sort of not appreciated by many in the US.”
It is a similar picture on air defence, which will be tested to the limit again this winter if, as expected, Russia targets Ukraine’s critical infrastructure with waves of missiles and drones.
Germany has stepped up, announcing on Tuesday it was sending a second US-built Patriot and a fifth German-made IRIS-T system to Ukraine. But Kyiv is still reliant on US interceptors for the bulk of its western-designed air defence batteries. Ukrainian forces could ration their use if they fear supplies are limited.
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Nato ministers say western support for Ukraine needs to move away from direct provision to procurement and domestic production. Kyiv has enjoyed success with its recent long-range strike campaign against Russian targets in Crimea using domestically made missiles and drones as well as UK and French cruise missiles.
But contracts with foreign defence companies and the expansion of domestic manufacturing will take time to deliver results.
“Ukraine is critically dependent on external support and it is needed now,” said Oleksiy Melnyk, a former Ukrainian air force lieutenant colonel and now co-director of the Razumkov Centre think-tank in Kyiv.
Additional reporting by Felicia Schwartz in Brussels
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023. All rights reserved.
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