Brian Berletic, April 22, 2025
Recent comments from current US Secretary of State Marco Rubio have signaled Washington’s intent to abandon peace efforts if progress isn’t made between Russia and Ukraine.
Related:
YouTube – Brian Berletic: Trump Will Sacrifice Europe To Russia While Preparing For War With China
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Some new Ukrainian soldiers refuse to fire at the enemy. Others, according to commanders and fellow fighters, struggle to assemble weapons or to coordinate basic combat movements. A few have even walked away from their posts, abandoning the battlefield altogether.
While Ukraine presses on with its incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, its troops are still losing precious ground along the country’s eastern front — a grim erosion that military commanders blame in part on poorly trained recruits drawn from a recent mobilization drive, as well as Russia’s clear superiority in ammunition and air power.
Poorly trained recruits contribute to loss of Ukrainian territory on eastern front, commanders say
Related:
Reuters: Russia and Ukraine report gains as some Ukrainians flee strategic city
But although the incursion is an embarrassment for Russia, Moscow’s forces have continued their gradual advances of the past few months against tired Ukrainian troops in eastern Ukraine worn down by 2-1/2 years of heavy fighting.
Moscow said its troops had taken control of the village of Mezhove in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, and that they had beaten back an attempt by a Ukrainian force to infiltrate its border in a different region to Kyiv’s Aug. 6 incursion.
Ukrainian authorities say Russian troops are now just 10 km (six miles) outside Pokrovsk, an important transport hub in eastern Ukraine, and this week started evacuating elderly residents and children.
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Moscow’s capture of Pokrovsk, which lies at an intersection of roads and a railway line, would give Russia options to advance in new directions and also cut supply routes used by the Ukrainian military in the Donetsk region.
WSJ: Ukraine Moves to Encircle Russian Troops in Kursk and Digs In for Long Fight
The incursion hasn’t, so far, shifted the dynamic on the war’s main battlefields in eastern Ukraine, where Russia is advancing in toward Pokrovsk, a key Ukrainian logistical hub, and Toretsk, a city on strategically important high ground.
The US Is Sending $125 Million in New Military Aid to Ukraine, Officials Say
F-16s won’t fundamentally alter the course of Ukraine War
Secondly, while the F-16 is clearly one of the best fourth-generation fighter jets in the world, its primary effectiveness is predicated on being one component in an integrated command and control battle management system of sensors. While the jet is capable of operating on its own, it is far less capable without additional acquisition assets, such as the E-3 Sentry AWACS. To date, there has been no discussion of providing this capability to Ukraine.
NATO already has AWACS in the area, though.
From the outset of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, only one of the five political parties in Canada’s Parliament had opposed the transfer of lethal aid to Ukraine. Until now, the only opponent of lethal aid was the Green Party of Canada (GPC).
In Canada’s Parliament, Voices of Peace Have Been Silenced
Either this narrative about weapon stockpiles, being depleted, is part of the information war or Russia is demilitarizing NATO!?!
U.S. and NATO scramble to arm Ukraine and refill their own arsenals
In Ukraine, the kind of European war thought inconceivable is chewing up the modest stockpiles of artillery, ammunition and air defenses of what some in NATO call Europe’s “bonsai armies,” after the tiny Japanese trees. Even the mighty United States has only limited stocks of the weapons the Ukrainians want and need, and Washington is unwilling to divert key weapons from delicate regions like Taiwan and Korea, where China and North Korea are constantly testing the limits.
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So the West is scrambling to find increasingly scarce Soviet-era equipment and ammunition that Ukraine can use now, including S-300 air defense missiles, T-72 tanks and especially Soviet-caliber artillery shells
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There are even discussions about NATO investing in old factories in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bulgaria to restart the manufacturing of Soviet-caliber 152-mm and 122-mm shells for Ukraine’s still largely Soviet-era artillery armory.
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The European Union has approved €3.1 billion ($3.2 billion) to repay member states for what they provide to Ukraine, but that fund, the [ironically-named] European Peace Facility, is nearly 90 percent depleted.
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Smaller countries have exhausted their potential, another NATO official said, with 20 of its 30 members “pretty tapped out.” But the remaining 10 can still provide more, he suggested, especially larger allies. That would include France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.
NATO’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, has advised the alliance — including, pointedly, Germany — that NATO guidelines requiring members to keep stockpiles should not be a pretext to limit arms exports to Ukraine. But it is also true that Germany and France, like the United States, want to calibrate the weapons Ukraine gets, to prevent escalation and direct attacks on Russia.
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Washington is also looking at older, cheaper alternatives like giving Ukraine anti-tank TOW missiles, which are in plentiful supply, instead of Javelins, and Hawk surface-to-air missiles instead of newer versions. But officials are increasingly pushing Ukraine to be more efficient and not, for example, fire a missile that costs $150,000 at a drone that costs $20,000.
The United States alone has given more than 1 million artillery shells, according to a report from the Department of Defense. But the U.S. is not alone. Although not to that scale, European nations have been steadily aiding Ukraine’s defense efforts. Now other allied nations are starting to worry they won’t have enough armaments for their own self-defense. The Associated Press reported that European nations are worried about their arms supplies should Russian aggression reach them.
The war in Ukraine is draining Western munition stockpiles
Biden Details New $625 Million Arms Package for Ukraine in Zelensky Call
The new $625 million package is being provided through the presidential drawdown authority, which allows Biden to send arms to Ukraine directly from US military stockpiles. A stopgap funding bill President Biden signed into law last week included $3.7 billion for this authority. It also included $12.3 billion for other military and economic aid for Ukraine, bringing total US spending on the war to about $67.5 billion, a number that’s higher than Russia’s entire military budget for 2021.
New $1.1 Billion Arms Package for Ukraine Includes 18 HIMARS Launchers
The HIMARS that the US has been sending to Ukraine are equipped with missiles that have a range of about 50 miles. But that can change, and Kyiv is requesting Army Tactical Missile Systems, which have a range of 190 miles, but Washington has been hesitant to send the longer-range missiles. Russia has warned that providing such arms would cross a “red line.”
Related:
The U.S. and Europe are running out of weapons to send to Ukraine
In the U.S. weapons industry, the normal production level for artillery rounds for the 155 millimeter howitzer — a long-range heavy artillery weapon currently used on the battlefields of Ukraine — is about 30,000 rounds per year in peacetime.
The Ukrainian soldiers fighting invading Russian forces go through that amount in roughly two weeks.
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Is the U.S. ability to defend itself at risk?
The short answer: no.
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The U.S. has essentially run out of the 155 mm howitzers [M777?] to give to Ukraine; to send any more, it would have to dip into its own stocks reserved for U.S. military units that use them for training and readiness. But that’s a no-go for the Pentagon, military analysts say, meaning the supplies reserved for U.S. operations are highly unlikely to be affected.
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