KYIV (Reuters) – Outgunned Ukrainian troops fighting Russian forces will start to receive artillery rounds in the “foreseeable future” under a Czech initiative to source shells to plug Ukraine’s ammunition shortage, Kyiv’s top diplomat said on Wednesday.
Prague located 800,000 artillery rounds in third countries earlier this year to supply to Ukraine and says it raised enough funding from allies to purchase a first batch of 300,000 on March 8.
“This week, we are going to contact our Czech colleagues, when they will introduce a detailed supply plan on how this is going to work,” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told a news conference in Kyiv.
The delivery of the shells under the initiative will be staggered over the year and initial deliveries “will not take many months”, he said. Work was under way to secure funding for similar other initiatives, he added.
“The Czech initiative is great but it’s far from sufficient, said Kuleba. “If, besides the Czech initiative, two more initiatives are implemented this year … the Russian troops in Ukraine will face more significant problems on the front line.”
Kyiv has relied heavily on Western military assistance throughout the full-scale war launched by Russia in February, 2022. But a major new package of U.S. military aid has been held up for months in Congress facing Republican resistance.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Rustem Umerov said earlier this year that “shell hunger” was a big problem for Ukrainian forces as international partners raced to amp up the production as Russia advanced in the east.
(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko; editing by Tom Balmforth and Tomasz Janowski)
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