In Eight Years, Russian Agents Blew Up 210,000 Tons Of Ukrainian Ammo—And Nearly Silenced Kyiv’s Artillery

Russia hasn’t done a lot right in its 10-month-old wider war on Ukraine. But it did at least one thing right before the war.

A systematic Russian sabotage campaign targeting Ukrainian depots destroyed a significant proportion of the Ukrainian army’s stocks of 122- and 152-millimeter shells and 122- and 300-millimeter rockets.

The sabotage so badly depleted Ukraine’s ammo supplies that, as a hundred Russian battalions rolled into northern, eastern and southern Ukraine starting in late February, there was a real risk of Ukraine’s big guns falling silent.

That would have been catastrophic for Kyiv. In Ukrainian ground-warfare doctrine, as in Russian ground-warfare doctrine, artillery is the decisive force. Tanks and infantry find and fix enemy forces so the big guns and rockets can destroy them.

If Ukraine had run out of shells—and it very nearly did—there wouldn’t have been much to stop Russian forces from barreling right over Ukrainian defenses. Just one thing saved Ukraine: emergency supplies of Western artillery plus shells and rockets to keep them blasting away.

Donations of guns and ammo kept Ukraine’s 12 independent artillery and rocket brigades, as well as the artillery battalions belonging to tank and infantry brigades, shooting until Ukraine could expand its own production of shells and rockets.

The Ukrainian army’s artillery corps was in bad shape when Russian troops first attacked eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region back in 2014. The corps oversaw just six independent artillery brigades. Across the entire Ukrainian army, there were just 1,900 artillery tubes and multiple-launch rocket systems. The Russian army, by comparison, had 4,200 tubes and launchers.

But the Russians didn’t count on their advantage in guns and launchers to win the next phase of the war. In anticipation of its wider attack on Ukraine, Russia targeted Ukraine’s ammunition.

Saboteurs slipped across the front line in eastern Ukraine and rigged bombs at Ukrainian depots. By 2022 “ammunition had been depleted by regular explosions at Ukrainian arsenals as a result of Russian sabotage,” analysts Mykhaylo Zabrodskyi, Jack Watling, Oleksandr Danylyuk and Nick Reynolds explained in a new study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.

“From 2014 to 2018, there were six such explosions, which destroyed more than 210,000 tons of ammunition, a large part of which were 152-mm shells and rockets for [multiple-launch rocket systems],” Zabrodskyi, Watling, Danylyuk and Reynolds wrote. “For comparison, during the five years of the war in Donbas, the [Ukrainian armed forces] spent about 70,000 tons of ammunition in total.”

As more and more Ukrainian depots exploded, experts sounded the alarm. The Ukrainian army’s most important forces, its tube artillery and rockets, were being rendered impotent.

“The loss and failure to resupply gun and rocket artillery ammunition has been a highly contentious issue in Ukraine,” Glen Grant, an analyst for the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, D.C. wrote in a 2021 study. “Rarely a day goes by without a comment about it in the Ukrainian media.”

The problem actually was worse than it appeared. The defense ministry in Kyiv was pulling a thousand old guns and launchers out of storage in order to equip a dozen new artillery brigades. More artillery. Fewer and fewer rounds per gun and launchers as depots exploded and the artillery force structure expanded.

In 2018, Ukrainian arms-manufacturer Ukroboronprom, announced it was beginning testing of new 152-millimeter shells that it would produce locally. But the firm wouldn’t deliver the first batch of shells until last week.

Ukraine’s foreign allies bridged the gap. When Russia widened its war on Ukraine in February, NATO countries swiftly pledged to Ukraine tens of billions of dollars’ worth of new and second-hand weaponry.

Artillery unsurprisingly was the priority. Starting this spring, NATO states began transferring to Ukraine no fewer than 700 guns and launchers. Some are Soviet-style weapons firing the same 122- and 152-millimeter shells and 122- and 300-millimeter rockets that Ukraine’s existing artillery fires.

But most fire NATO-standard 105- and 155-millimeter shells and 227-millimeter rockets. While some NATO countries—Poland, for instance—are sitting on significant stocks of Soviet-caliber ammunition they can transfer to Ukraine, almost all NATO countries have large stocks of NATO-caliber ammo. And many of those countries have their own production lines for 105- and 155-millimeter shells and 227-millimeter rockets.

Equipping Ukraine with 700 new guns and launchers didn’t just make good the Ukrainian army’s combat losses and allow the army to expand its artillery brigades and battalions. It also helped to ease the ammo crisis that began back in 2014—by switching much of the Ukrainian army over to ammo types that Kyiv’s allies easily can produce.

Russia’s eight-year sabotage campaign targeting Ukrainian ammo dumps very nearly succeeded in silencing Kyiv’s artillery. But it didn’t succeed—and now the crisis seemingly has passed.

Indeed, now it’s the Russians who are running out of ammo. As the Ukrainian army this spring reequipped with farther-firing American rocket-launchers and European howitzers, it also launched a counterlogistics campaign targeting Russian ammo dumps as far as 50 miles behind the front line.

The Ukrainian and Russian armies have been firing their guns and rockets virtually nonstop since February. Between local production and foreign supplies, the Ukrainian army should be able to keep firing away.

The Russian army, however, just might run out of ammo. While Russia’s arms industry is bigger than Ukraine’s is, it also is fragile from a lack of modernization—and hamstrung by corruption. Anticipating shortages of shells and rockets, the Kremlin already has drawn down Belarusian ammo stocks. It’s gone shopping in North Korea and Iran, too.

Ask yourself this: if you’re waging a potentially yearslong artillery war along a 500-mile front, which countries would you want to supply your ammo in order to keep you in the fight? The United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Poland? Or Belarus, North Korea and Iran?