I ran across this article the other day. It's been widely reported that Ukraine is running low on ammunition.
What I didn't know is that Russia has been sabotaging Ukraine's ammunition storage facilities for years, and is now threatening arms dealers who attempt to buy ammunition for Ukraine. This was apparently a major effort by the Russians.
It will be somewhat ironic if Ukraine prevails and ends up replacing it's old soviet-era weapons with a fresh supply of more advanced NATO-compatible weapons as a result of the war (this change appears to happening already to some degree).
>>>Most of Ukraine’s artillery pieces date back to the Soviet Union, meaning they rely on the same 122mm- and 152mm-caliber rounds that Russia uses. But outside of Russia, very little supply exists — in large part because Russia spent years targeting Ukrainian and other Eastern European ammunition storage facilities and suppliers before launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in late February. Russia has also taken other steps to acquire the ammunition or otherwise prevent its sale to Ukraine. . . .
A sort of shadow war is taking place for what few 152mm shells are available on the global market. A U.S. citizen helping to broker weapons transfers to Ukraine said he recently approached an Eastern European country to negotiate a purchase of artillery rounds. Officials in that country said they couldn’t make a deal, the man said, because the Russians had already warned that they would “kill them if they sold anything to the Ukrainians.” . . .
In 2014, after Russia first invaded Ukraine and fueled a separatist war in the country’s east, members of the elite Russian military intelligence unit 29155 sabotaged ammunition stored at depots in the Czech Republic, according to Czech authorities.
The following year, according to
Bellingcat, a Britain-based investigative organization, members of the same unit used a nerve agent to poison a Bulgarian weapons executive, who
told the New York Times he had been storing ammunition at the Czech facilities and had sold arms to Ukraine. . . .
Russian saboteurs are also suspected of causing four explosions at Bulgarian arms depots from 2011 to 2020, according to Bulgarian prosecutors, who have said Moscow was aiming to disrupt supplies to Ukraine and Georgia.
Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, “appears to have had a campaign across Europe to try to suppress the supply of munitions to Ukraine,” said Michael Kofman, a Russian military analyst at Virginia-based CNA. “They were likely doing it with foresight.”
Ukrainian officials suspect Russian and separatist saboteurs extended the effort inside Ukraine in recent years, leading to a series of explosions at ammunition storage facilities.
Blasts in 2017 at two big Ukrainian depots, which together had stored 221 metric tons of ammunition, dealt a massive setback to Ukrainian forces, sapping them of critical supplies that would be difficult and expensive to replace.<<<
