Defense expert Ko Colijn has been providing the Dutch with explanations for armed conflicts for 48 years. For NU.nl he follows the battle in Ukraine and answers our (and your) questions. This time: what about the weapons supplied to Ukraine by the West?
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said last Thursday that his country is finally starting to benefit from promised Western arms supplies. This would be apparent from some advances of his army in the south, near the cities of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
This was despite Russian advances in the east, especially in Luhansk, where what is said to have been a Pyrrhic victory of sorts: one that was laboriously accomplished, drawing Russian combat power away from the south.
Last Sunday, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), where most Dutch ‘experts’ draw their wisdom, reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin also has the Kharkiv region in his sights – or maybe even more. Either way, it would mean more to destroy than to conquer.
True or false, Zelensky’s comment at least proves that the first western guns are arriving, despite Russian efforts to stop them. By the way, they don’t even have the wide reach that the Ukrainians actually want.
Sergei Kuzan, the director of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center in Kyiv, said he is beginning to notice the presence of the 155mm howitzer guns and the first HIMARS missile launchers. According to him, twenty Russian weapons depots have already been destroyed with precision fire.
It is a strange situation, because both the Russians and the Ukrainians claim profit.
US is not yet delivering the bottom line
At least the Americans don’t seem too worried. The new military aid package of 400 million dollars (399 million euros), which President Joe Biden made available last week, contains ‘only’ a thousand precision grenades for the 126 155 mm howitzers that the US has promised. Ukraine has requested 36,000 grenades and is now firing 6,000 a day, so that 1,000 more seems like a pittance.
This includes the HIMARS rocket launcher, of which twelve are now deployed at the front in the Donets basin, but of which Ukraine wants dozens. Preferably with a longer pregnancy, to be able to hit targets in Russia itself.
Not all that necessary, according to the American army chief of staff James McConville, because those things are so precise that almost every shot hits. So you don’t have to match them one-on-one with the twelve thousand fired Russian shells per day, which often miss their target.
As for that greater range, McConville says he doesn’t want to start using such weapons in the US military itself until 2023. So for the time being there seems to be no question of accelerated delivery to Ukraine at all.
What the US has committed to as of July 1, can be read on a fact sheet from the Pentagon.
Mysterious attacks in Russia
What is secretly delivered to Ukraine, we unfortunately (but understandably) do not know. I wouldn’t be surprised if we never hear what’s behind the mysterious attacks just over the border (ie in Russia itself).
Are they performed by so-called volunteers or by older special forces, active as ‘instructors’ near the battlefield? US Republican senators are in favor of that, but Biden thinks it is too risky and officially does not want to do it.
Ukraine war is on balance an expensive joke for Putin
Meanwhile, Putin can count his knots. In exchange for a quarter of Ukraine, he managed to get Finland and Sweden to join NATO. Also, his land is even more landlocked than it used to be. He is known as a grain thief and hospital destroyer. The Baltic Sea has become a NATO inland sea and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad is more isolated than ever. We pretend in NATO that Kaliningrad is a dangerous outpost of Russia, but people in Brussels and Moscow will think differently.
And then the military spending. The Financial Times (a newspaper that is also read in the Kremlin) wondered earlier this month whether all the extra defense budgets in the West make sense. Not only does the Russian army appear to be operating moderately or even poorly, Putin milks his economy further every day that the war lasts longer.
In the same week the magazine wrote Foreign Affairs that 29 European countries have jointly planned $209 billion in additional defense spending since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Tens of billions of North American dollars are added to this. The European ‘extra’ alone is more than three times the total Russian defense budget.
Putin can’t be happy about that. No matter how uncritical all this Western money laundering is committed, the Russian leader can write it on the profit and loss account with the “debt burden” of his special military operation.