Western officials have been talking up Russia’s ammo crunch for months. Is its army running out of shells?
Putin tonight what his own generals and ministers are probably too afraid to say,” declared Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Britain’s chief of defence staff, on December 14th: “Russia faces a critical shortage of artillery munitions.” Ten days earlier Avril Haines, America’s top intelligence official, had offered a similar judgment. Is Russia running out of shells?
Others disagree. On December 9th Colonel Margo Grosberg, the head of Estonian defence intelligence, said that Russia had around 10m shells and the capacity to produce 3.4m more within a year. At the peak rate of fire, during the summer in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Russia was using around 20,000 rounds per day, he said, meaning that the country has sufficient ammunition “to fight for at least a year, if not longer”.
armies. If the Pentagon is to be believed, Russia is firing some shells that were produced in the early 1980s. “You load the ammunition, and you cross your fingers and hope it’s going to fire,” said the American defence official. Some metrics, such as steel output, offer a clue. But they can also mislead. In September Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute , another think-tank, explained that earlier assessments of Russian artillery production, from June, had overstated capacity because they focused on Russia’s ability to cast and fill shells rather than on the production of explosives inside. American and British intelligence both say that Russia’s production rate is highly constrained.
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