Europe will fill the arms shortage amid doubts about the US commitment to Ukraine

Faced with growing American reluctance to send more military aid to Ukraine, European leaders are trying to fill the void, promising new support to Kiev, which is battling Russia in Europe’s backyard.

Several countries – including Germany, Britain and Norway – are increasing production of weapons, especially the artillery ammunition that Ukraine so desperately needs. Germany, once a laggard in providing aid to Ukraine, announced a week ago that it planned to double its support to $8.5 billion by 2024 and deliver more crucial air defense systems by the end of this year. And European Union states are preparing to train another 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers, bringing the total so far to 40,000.

“We really have to go a step further here,” said Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren forum this month at the Clingendael Institute, a think tank funded by the Dutch government.

But that may offer little comfort to Ukraine, where a counteroffensive against invading Russian forces has stalled as winter approaches, and officials say more support is now needed even as many countries turn their attention to the war between Israel and Gaza.

A worrying sign is that the EU is unlikely to pass an early test of its ability to sustain support for Ukraine. A much-touted pledge to donate a million 155-millimeter caliber grenades to Ukraine within a year is now widely expected to fall through.

“The million will not be reached – we have to assume,” German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said this week, acknowledging the bloc will miss the March 2024 deadline.

European officials have long worried that growing Republican opposition to the military aid the United States is sending to Ukraine — $45 billion in weapons and other equipment so far — would reduce America’s leading role in financing the war as president Biden would lose re-election.

These concerns became all the more acute this month when Republicans in the House of Representatives set aside Biden’s $105 billion plan for emergency aid for various world crises, including about $61.4 billion for Ukraine.

Unless, or until, the budget impasse is resolved, officials in Washington and Kiev must weigh how best to spend remaining spending. $4.9 billion in previously approved security assistance to Ukraine, if that is the last available source of U.S. financing for the foreseeable future.

“We Europeans, who have the necessary resources to do this, must be politically and materially prepared to help Ukraine and continue to do so, even taking over from the United States if, as is perhaps likely, support for Ukraine is declining.” Josep Borrell Fontelles, the European Union’s top diplomat, said recently.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked European leaders who realized their militaries and defense industries were ill-prepared for the war in their backyard. It was a “rude awakening,” Swedish Defense Minister Pal Jonson said at the Clingendael forum, but one that united most of Europe behind Ukraine – seen by many as a kind of buffer zone between Russia and NATO.

“If the West stops supporting Ukraine, there will be no more Ukraine and no more European security architecture,” Yonatan Vseviyov, a leading Estonian diplomat, said in a speech. interview published Friday on the Ukrainian news agency RBC.

Some European countries are already responding.

While there is not unanimous support for Ukraine – Slovakia has said it will cut military aid to Kiev, and Hungary is trying to block new EU funding for the war – on Friday alone the The Netherlands, Finland And Lithuania all announced new defense support. The largest amount came from the Dutch government, which promised to send more than 2.1 billion dollars next year.

The Belgian government has also announced that it will give Ukraine almost $1.85 billion next year from taxing the proceeds of frozen Russian assets currently held by financial institutions headquartered in Belgium.

And President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine praised Berlin’s plans to double its military support for the war, saying on Wednesday that “the relationship between Ukraine and Germany will become one of the most reliable pillars in all of Europe.”

Germany is now the second largest supplier of military aid to Ukraine, according to data released in July by the Kiel Institute, the most recent data available. (On Friday, the German government temporarily paused discussions on the 2024 budget due to an unrelated court ruling, but experts said aid to Ukraine was not expected to be affected.)

Europe is now also about to provide Ukraine with one of the weapons it needs most: 155 millimeter caliber shells fired from the howitzers and which backbone of the Ukrainian army.

Despite the supposed failure of EU member states and Norway’s campaign to donate a million of the bullets, officials and experts say that just making the pledge to supply the ammunition has helped revive of the European defense industry.

The build-up of ammunition production capacity in Europe has improved so significantly that there could be “balance” with U.S. production by the end of next year if forecasts remain stable, said Camille Grand, assistant secretary general of the NATO for defense investments at the start of the war.

How that might happen depends on somewhat murky production estimates that European executives and U.S. officials have released.

In Europe, where there is no overarching defense coordinator, arms manufacturers are generally reluctant to make public their annual production numbers. A major exception is the German company Rheinmetall, one of the largest ammunition manufacturers in the West. It predicts that it will be possible to produce at least 600,000 155-millimeter bullets annually by the end of 2024, up from 450,000 earlier this year.

BAE Systems, the giant British military contractor, wants to stop producing 155-millimeter grenades by 2025, eight times higher than before the war, although the company would not provide an estimate of how many rounds that could be. Other European ammunition manufacturers, including Norway-based Nammo and France’s Nexter, are increasing production by tens of thousands of rounds.

All told, Mr. Grand said, Europe could produce hundreds of thousands of 155-millimeter rounds of ammunition by the end of 2024 — up from about 230,000 rounds a year before the start of the war.

New projections from the US military show that US manufacturers aim to produce 720,000 grenades annually by the end of 2024.

Further production increases depend largely on whether Congress approves them $3.1 billion that is included in the Biden administration’s $105 billion overall relief proposal, said Douglas R. Bush, deputy secretary of the U.S. Army and the service’s chief acquisition officer.

In a Nov. 7 briefing in Washington, Mr. Bush said the extra money would boost the U.S. economy production from 155 millimeter ammunition to as many as 80,000 rounds per month in the first half of 2025, or 960,000 per year.

Only some of the munitions ultimately produced, both in the United States and Europe, would be sent to Ukraine while allies rebuild their own stockpiles. But increasing production is a necessary first step to supply Ukraine and strengthen European security.

Mr. Grand, now at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the possibility that an aid-cutting Republican presidential candidate would defeat Mr. Biden was a major driver of the ongoing European struggle — especially as some recent polls have shown that former President Donald J. Trump has strong support in a theoretical rematch with Mr. Biden. As president, Mr. Trump took a dim view of NATO and planned to withdraw thousands of U.S. troops from Europe before Mr. Biden was elected in 2020 and halted the move.

“We have to be in that capability mindset,” Mr. Grand said. “And those decisions need to be made now – not when Trump is re-elected.”

Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting from Berlin, Aurelien Breeden from Paris and Claire Moses from London.