[Every Point new defense (1646 issue) June 13]: Although the conflict has progressed so far, Ukraine has received a large amount of weapons and ammunition from the West, but it is still beaten by the Russian army in the eastern region of Ukraine, and recently the Ukrainian military has found the fundamental reason why it cannot fight: the number of artillery and shells is far inferior to that of Russia! That is why Ukrainian officials have repeatedly publicly demanded more weapons and ammunition over the past few days. The current battles in Donbass are mainly contests between long-range firepower, and the "artillery", as the "king of war", rules the fields and rivers of Donbass. The Russian military has a suffocating long-range fire superiority, and in some areas the number of guns and between the Russian and Ukrainian armies is 20 to 1 and the number of ammunition is 40 to 1. Therefore, the Ukrainian army was unsurprisingly "harvested" round after round by Russian artillery fire!
The deputy director of the Ukrainian Intelligence Service (GUR) said that the Russian army not only far exceeded the number of guns of the Ukrainian army, but also the ammunition reserves were extremely abundant, so the Ukrainian army was in urgent need of more artillery and ammunition supplies in the two-sided position warfare in the North Donetsk region. This is because the Ukrainian army has already consumed almost all of the Soviet-era stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, so they are now in urgent need of Western assistance with more artillery and ammunition, and to help the Ukrainian army transition to the establishment of a new ammunition supply chain and the use of Western artillery systems, only in this way can the Ukrainian army gain an advantage in the "war of bombardment" with the Russian army in the Donbass region.
At present, because the Russian artillery unit can rely on several times the number of shells of the Ukrainian army, with the cooperation of unmanned aerial vehicles, more arbitrary strikes are launched against Ukrainian targets, although the Ukrainian army is also using drones to find Russian targets, but the number and intensity of attacks it can launch are far inferior to those of the Russian army. As early as the beginning of the war, the key target of the Russian special forces and long-range cruise missiles was the Ukrainian ammunition depot, and we have seen many reports of the Russian army using air-based and sea-based cruise missiles to destroy the Ukrainian army's hidden ammunition depot in the far western region, many of which are the inventory of the Soviet Union.
As the war situation fell into a stalemate, the Russian army was gradually advancing with the strategy of "boiling frogs in warm water", a tactic that relied on the huge ammunition reserves left by the Soviet Union. If these munitions are not used, Russia will have to spend every year to maintain or destroy them, and now this problem can be solved by continuing the shelling of Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region. With the depletion of Soviet stocks of ammunition, even if the Ukrainian army still retains a lot of Soviet artillery, it will become scrap iron because there is no source of ammunition. And since the beginning of the war, the Soviet weapons and ammunition aided by Eastern European countries have also bottomed out, and the assistance received by the Ukrainian army is now all NATO standard standard weapons and ammunition, whether it is ordinary artillery or self-propelled artillery, the caliber is always 155 mm, and the ammunition is also matching 155 mm.
Although the United States had previously provided nearly 190,000 matching 155 mm shells when it aided more than 100 M777 howitzers, other countries also provided tens of thousands of shells. These more than 200,000 shells look quite a lot, but according to the Ukrainian army, because of the artillery battle with the Russian army in the Donbass region in the past February, the two sides need to consume thousands of shells every day, although most of them are Russian shells, but even if the Ukrainian army only consumes 1,000 shells per day, it has used about 60,000 shells in these 2 months. And this is only the consumption in North Donetsk, and if it is expanded to the consumption of the entire Ukrainian regional front, these more than 200,000 shells are now almost bottomed out. Therefore, this is an important reason why Ukraine urgently asked Western countries to increase aid for artillery and ammunition.
Of course, the ammunition reserves of NATO countries are certainly enough for the Ukrainian army to consume, but there are two key problems that cannot be solved: First, the weight of the 155 mm shell is very large, and if hundreds of thousands of shells are transported by land from the Polish border to the Ukrainian eastern front, the huge convoy or freight train will easily attract the attack of the Russian army. And with the current method of attrition, hundreds of thousands of shells may not be able to make the Ukrainian army support for too long; Second, even if NATO solves the problem of transporting a large amount of ammunition to the Ukrainian front, it will be difficult to turn the tide of the war because the number of Ukrainian artillery is too small. However, the number of artillery and self-propelled artillery in NATO member countries in Europe is generally not much, and any country that can have more than 100 guns can be regarded as a "military power". Therefore, in order to protect itself, it is impossible to help the Ukrainian army too much, which is why the Ukrainian army has received the largest amount of hundreds of artillery aid from the United States.
In this way, if the Russian army were not now training its troops in the form of "round warfare" and trying to reduce civilian casualties and reduce the damage to civilian infrastructure, it would have been able to drive the Ukrainian army out of the Donbass region by relying only on the huge artillery superiority. I don't know how the West should help the Ukrainian army next, after all, if it is still like the "squeezed toothpaste" assistance that provided several artillery pieces at a time, the Ukrainian army in the Eastern Region will have no capital to continue to consume, after all, just by relying on the number of people, it cannot be "hard bar" with thousands of shells every day!