A New Arms Race

As the war drags on, both Russia and Ukraine are using more shells than they can buy or produce

- Natalia Drozdiak

On an average day in Ukraine, the opposing armies lob as many as 30,000 shells at one another. That’s more than 200,000 a week, almost 1 million a month—without including the bullets, land mines, hand grenades and other munitions being deployed as Vladimir Putin’s invasion enters its second year.

While Russian troops typically fire about twice as many rounds as Ukrainian forces do, stockpiles on both sides are shrinking. Ukraine’s ammunition use is “many times higher” than the current rate of production of its allies, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels on Feb. 13.

That’s set up a scramble to get more ammunition and weaponry to the front, making the war as much a battle of factories as of troops. Neither side is at risk of totally depleting its inventory, but dwindling supplies restrict an army’s options, says Mark Cancian, a former US Marine colonel who’s now an adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. “At some point, that becomes a problem,” he says. “If it becomes too constrained, you can’t shoot at really good targets.”

Some analysts say the conflict is showing uncomfortable parallels with World War I, when the combatants settled into entrenched positions and fired countless shells, hoping to break the stalemate. As the conflict dragged on, both sides suffered a shortage of artillery shells, and in 1915 Britain’s government was driven from office after it failed to deliver enough ammunition in what became known as the “shell crisis.”