Ukraine Is Benefiting From Ammunition Pledge, Czech Envoy Says

Peter Laca and Patrick Donahue
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(Bloomberg) -- Ukrainian forces are benefiting from a plan to deliver hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds to the front line as they use up stocks in anticipation that more is on the way, the Czech Republic’s top diplomat said.

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Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said the Czech-led initiative, which foresees the procurement of some 800,000 shells from sources outside the European Union, is bearing fruit even if the badly needed shipments may be weeks away from delivery.

“As we see, it already helps Ukraine to fight better, because they know that they will have a supply of fresh ammunition, which changed their perspective on usage of the current stockpiles,” Lipavsky said in an interview in Prague on Monday.

Ukrainian forces are struggling to fend off a renewed Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine as the war-battered nation runs low on shells even as the Kremlin ramps up domestic production and opens new channels from countries such as North Korea.

Kyiv is holding out as US funding worth more than $60 billion is stalled in Congress, blocked by House Republicans seeking concessions on border security. The target date of an EU plan to deliver 1 million shells to Kyiv has been postponed until the end of the year.

The Czech plan, announced last month at the Munich Security Conference by the country’s president, Petr Pavel, has been embraced by members of the NATO military alliance as a stopgap measure.

Lipavsky said the Czech initiative wouldn’t be sufficient on its own to back Ukraine. Funding for the first deliveries to Ukraine needs to be processed before the shipments are sent off.

“We can do much more than the initially announced number,” the top envoy said in his office, citing a figure of 1.5 million shells as a potential volume.

‘Foreseeable future’

Even as EU leaders welcomed the plan, some of the bloc’s largest countries have yet to make concrete pledges. Germany, by contrast, is spending €300 million ($325 million) to buy 180,000 shells.

Lipavsky declined to say how long deliveries to the front line would take. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said earlier this month that stocks would arrive in the “foreseeable future” rather than in a matter of months.

The Czech minister said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempts to tie Friday’s concert atrocity in Moscow, for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility, to Ukraine is a “huge shame.” Even as Putin blamed Islamists for carrying out the attack that killed at least 139 people, he suggested that it was connected to the past decade of antagonism between Russia and the West over Ukraine.

“Almost immediately they were able to use it for their propaganda purposes,” Lipavsky said.

The minister commented that the Russian leader is holding out until the US election in November, in hopes that Donald Trump will be reelected. Until then, there should be no assumption that Russia’s war effort will abate.

“He believes, probably, that this will create a better position for him,” Lipavsky said. “And it’s a clear guidance for us that definitely for the rest of this year, he will not back down.”

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