Reuters World News - Ukraine's dire shell shortage after years of miscalculations by the West

Episode Date: July 20, 2024

Since Russia seized Crimea in 2014, policymakers in America and Europe repeatedly failed to address warnings about the sorry condition of the West’s munitions industry. The result: an inability to adequately supply Ukraine with a key weapon, and a shift of the war in Russia’s favor. Stephen Grey and John Shiffman talk through their reporting on a special episode of Reuters World News. Read the Special Report here. Sign up for the Reuters Econ World newsletter here. Listen to the Reuters Econ World podcast here. Visit the Thomson Reuters Privacy Statement for information on our privacy and data protection practices. You may also visit megaphone.fm/adchoices to opt out of targeted advertising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the front lines of the war in Ukraine, Russia has been slowly advancing. Moscow has claimed recent gains in the eastern Dernetsk region, as Ukraine's forces struggle to push them back. Whilst more aid and support has been promised by the West, a shortage of ammunition, in particular the pivotal 155mm artillery shell, is seen as one of the key reasons for Russian advances in the in the last year. On this episode of Reuters World News, we hear from soldiers on the front lines about that

shortage of ammunition and how last fall supplies suddenly stopped. We investigate why and how these supply issues can be traced back to decisions in the corridors of power of Washington, D.C. and Europe over many years. how miscalculations made by the US military and its NATO allies in the years leading up to the 2022 invasion could have tilted the war in Russia's favour. I'm David Spencer in London. Stephen Gray has been working on this story. Stephen, tell us why you and your colleagues started to investigate this.

I've been involved in covering the war and we got reports earlier this year that Ukrainian units were running desperately short of ammunition and I obviously wanted to know how serious that was, how effective that was in change in the course of the war, but also why were they short of the basic things they need to fight the Russians? There were reports that made quite a big story about how the US Congress had been blocking a major aid package and some people blamed the Congress for the fact

that many Ukrainians were losing their lives as Russia turned on the attack and Ukraine turned onto defense mode. So we started to investigate what was the real cause. And I think we found something interesting, which was that the shortages of ammunition in Ukraine came very suddenly. It was like a light switch had been turned. We were told by the soldiers. We spoke to about six different frontline units when I went out there.

And the other thing was they were warned even before Congress blocked the aid package. that's the summer of last year, supplies were running out, that the US, which had been rushing with millions of shells for artillery to Ukraine, was unable to supply that in the same rate. And they were going to face a pretty tough winter. You've spoken to some of these units. What did they tell you about that tough winter? So we started talking, first of all, to frontline units

and to see how short did they get? And how did it happen? Did it happen one day? and it became very clear that around September October, multiple units told us ammunition stopped coming very suddenly from the point they were attacking, they were moving forward, seizing Russian trenches, to the point that ammunition ran out,

which means they didn't get support. And one soldier was talking about how they had to move from literally attacking to defending, start digging, dig a trench, try to defend. And I think ever since that period, you can see how the front lines have shifted slowly, but decisively forward. The Russians have been creeping forward. And obviously that has left many in Ukraine quite demoralized. Yeah, I can imagine. But looking at this, the time frame that you're describing is before the delays in the aid package approval from Congress in the US.

So what were the causes that you found? We've been looking deep into the supply chain, the actual. ingredients that make up the process of providing artillery shells to Ukraine and discovered that root cause of what's been going on here are poor decisions and bad predictions dating back years even since the invasion by Russia of Ukraine not in 2022 but in 2014 when they seized Crimea and the eastern part of their country even since then there was inadequate, you could say, preparation for confronting the Russians. Very little was done to improve the production capacity of the West, that's NATO and the US, to be able to provide the kind of

ammunition that was necessary to confront a superpower, conventional superpower like Russia. And what are we specifically talking about here? So the crucial ammunition that Ukraine has relied on is heavy shells. These are the long-range artillery that can fire about 20 kilometres, and the crucial piece of ammunition is called the 155mm shell. That's a NATO round, and Ukraine decided early in the war, after it received an offer from the US and NATO, to essentially replace old legacy Soviet calibers

and to move to this 155mm, and they would be provided with artillery pieces from all over Europe and the US, and also the ammunition to go with it. Having made that switch, they obviously became dependent on NATO to actually provide the ammunition and to keep providing it

in the face of a continuous onslaught from the Russians who have much more ammunition. Stephen, you mentioned that you went to Ukraine, this was in May. Tell us more about that trip. From Kerwitzer, about 12 hours' drive to the front now,

into eastern Ukraine. And I went out there first to Kharkiv, which was under attack from the north in a new offensive, and then to Dernetsk, to a town called Kramatosk. We're seeing like plumes of smokerhead, so how far do you think we are from

the actual front line? From here, about 32 kilometres from the front line, and we're heading from west to east. That's east in front of us. So what do you think those, those plumes of smoke are. A striking moment was driving towards a town called Barova, where we crossed the brow of a hill

and just saw in front of us these clouds of billowing smokes in different directions, this dark, acrid smoke rising up from tree lines. And it turned out that Russia had overnight been shelling this area, shelling it with incendiary, that's shells making fire, to these tree lines. And apparently, according to soldiers, in order to smoke out the Ukrainian units, artillery, which can fire about up to 20, 25 kilometres hidden in these trees. And the Russians were essentially setting light to it all to try to get the spot where these guns were so they

could hit them with counter battery fire. What was morale like? So these guys have been fighting on the front line for over eight months without relief. And that's the case for many Ukrainians, unlike the Russians, they seem to have no troop rotation, or they weren't at the time. So they were quite exhausted, really. And they've been down to the level of having barely two or three shells per day. We spoke to another brigade where they had three shells for the entire brigade. That's covering about 20 kilometres of the front line at one point. But these guys, they just described the experience of trying to stop the Russians attacking when they had so little to fire at them. Because the key thing about artillery is it hits the attacking troops as they're

crossing the ground towards the Ukrainian trenches and hits the armored vehicles or tanks that are advancing. And if you don't have the ability to fire this artillery, then the Russians can get right up onto the trenches and that's when their infantry soldiers get killed or injured. Another artillery guy I was saying, well, you know, the Russians at one point, they weren't even bothering to fire at our positions because we were no threat. We had nothing to send to threaten them with because we had no shells to fire. But how do you fight a war without ammunition? I should say that the situation has been improving slightly since the US Congress did pass more funds. The US has sent more supplies, Europe is producing more, but it's still nothing like what Ukraine needs. There's a huge

backlog there. We estimate that Ukraine has gone through perhaps two decades of production by the west of artillery shells. We obviously wanted to know why it was they didn't get this, they weren't getting supplies. And I was working with a colleague, John Schiffman, who was in the USA and has been going around the factories and talking to the experts to sort of work out why it is that supply chain hasn't been working. My name is John Schiffman. I'm an investigative reporter for Reuters based in Washington. So I went and visited one of the places in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where they make the metal casings for the 155 millimeter and saw how they make them. It's a facility that's sold. It's on the National Register of Historic Places in the United States. It was first used to make artillery

during the Korean War. And for years, it was not updated. And now they are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade this place. What we found there was that the priority of making 155s dropped dramatically in the decade before the war. In fact, for one period between 2014 and 2015, the U.S. didn't add any 155 artillery to its stockpiles at all. But we also found problems elsewhere in the process. We found that manufacturing defects and safety violations triggered repeated

production shutdowns. A year before the war, the discovery of cracks in shell production cut capacity in half for months. We also found that a U.S. decision to change the type of explosive it uses in these shells from TNT to a new one called IMX has backfired. It didn't really help the war effort, and it's been kind of an expensive flop. In fact, we found that in Tennessee, the Army spent $147 million on a facility related to 155 shells that it doesn't even use. because the plans have changed. What does the Pentagon say about your findings? They said that the reason that the slowdown in production of the shells occurred because,

frankly, nobody thought that there'd be a land war like this again in modern times. The experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq were different and the shell wasn't used that much. They also said they thought they had enough on hand. Obviously, they didn't. They just simply said that nobody could have seen this coming. despite Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. But some people knew this might be an issue? We talked to people who were involved, who issued these warnings.

One of them said, hey, we were talking about this all the time. What happens if we get ourselves into a war situation? We're totally unprepared to surge for war. And then on the other hand, you have what the Pentagon officials told us, which is, hey, you know what? All these warnings really came in handy because, in fact, we were lucky. because since we had all these warnings and what we needed to do, once war broke out, we were able to go to Congress and get the money to do it.

Stephen, bringing it back to your work on this investigation. You also looked at other production issues and supply issues, problems around getting those supplies to Ukraine. Tell me about that leg of your journey. So I took the terrain up into Western Poland, which is the site of a TNT plant. That's making the explosive that has been used. since World War I in artillery shells. This area used to cover a huge part of the forest and was actually built by the Nazis in World War II. They started TNT production there

in order to supply the Eastern Front, what was then the Soviet Union, now Russia and Ukraine. And now, quite extraordinarily, we discovered this is the only TNT plant on a major scale functioning in the US and Europe. There's actually nowhere in the US. USA, which is making TNT. And they rely on this factory, which produces about 10,000 tons of TNT every year. And that's what the West has got. Apart from that, major producers of TNT, China and India, none of which are particularly reliable as partners in the middle of a war where both those countries have tried to maintain good relations with Russia. Tell us more about this facility.

So this is a strange place. It's surrounded by woods, as it is a strange place. It's surrounded by woods, it was when it existed in World War II. Obviously, it's been modernized several times since. But you still have the basic idea of these explosive plants, where you move through this area surrounded by earth, giant earth berms, big earth walls. So you can't actually see any one time. You can't see very much because every building is completely surrounded by these earthworks.

Designed. So if there's an explosion in one building, it doesn't kick off an explosion in another. and the explosive force is channeled up into the air and not sideways where it could kill people and destroy other facilities. So it's a strange kind of eerie place, but we were shown into the place where they were filling the shells,

shown the place where they actually produced the TNT, and then finally the outcome of it all, these boxes coming out out of a conveyor belt, and they've got pictures of what looks like a fish in agony, which is, I think, a reference to the Tox. sick nature of TNT. And the TNT itself looks like yellow rice. It's quite in small little fragments. Apparently if you could set a light to it with a cigarette lighter and it would just smoke, it won't explode. And that's one of the qualities of TNT, which is why it was adopted by Western

militaries, is you can melt it, put it, pour it into a shell, mix it with other explosives, without it exploding. And our lines are working for 100% for a couple of years. We were speaking to a sales manager called Norbert D.E. who showed us around the plant along with the CEO. There is no TNT on market to fulfill the needs of the market. And explained just how difficult it was to get hold of TNT from this facility. If I came to you now and I'm representing a NATO government, an ally of Poland, and said, right, give me some thousand tons of TNT, what would you tell me?

It's not a secret that we will invite you in 2020. 2007 or 2026 to start talking about 2007. So, Stephen, what do you think this investigation tells us about supplies to Ukraine? For Ukraine, what we've seen is

they are facing the consequences, if you like, of not just a lack of stockpile of weapons, but an actual destruction of the capacity to make weapons when they're needed. There weren't production lines that were sort of lying unused. They were

production lines that are just been eliminated. And that's a problem. We can see that there's a lot of effort to revive those production facilities, but even so quite difficult to revive them quickly, particularly when some of these items are quite toxic. And actually, for example, to make a T&T plant, you actually need to find a place that will have it very difficult. And with only a very limited artillery shield to protect their front line from attack. This year, the months ahead are going to be very tough for Ukraine. My thanks to Stephen Gray and John Schiffman for their work on this story and their contribution to this podcast. You can read more about this story and our extensive coverage of the war in Ukraine on Reuters.com or on the Reuters app.

Reuters World News is produced by Gail Issa, Jonah Green, Christopher Waljasper, Tara Oaks, and myself David Spencer. Our regular host is Kim Vernel. Carmel Crimmons is our senior editor. Our executive editor is Lila Decretza. Music and sound design is by Josh Summer. And the team will be back on Monday with our daily headline show.