Men, morale, munitions: Russia’s Ukraine war faces long slog

From a hideout in a bombed-out house in eastern Ukraine, army commander Mykhailo Strebizh twirls a mortar shell the size of a bowling pin, calling it “aid we got from Europe and America.”

He then turns to a makeshift blackboard — a door with words written on it in chalk -- showing weapon inventories. One line says “NATO” in Cyrillic letters, then a number: 11.

These days, Ukraine’s beleaguered but unbowed forces are doing a lot of counting about the help they’re getting from abroad.

As Russia’s initially botched and broad offensive turns its focus to the eastern Donbas region, the war has entered a new and seemingly more enduring phase. While Russia has kept quiet about its war casualties, Ukrainian authorities say up to 200 of their soldiers are dying each day. Experts say both sides are taking heavy losses.

The United States last week upped the ante with its largest pledge of aid for Ukrainian forces yet — an additional $1 billion in military assistance aimed to help repel or reverse Russian advances.

But experts note that such aid deliveries haven’t kept pace with needs, raising questions about how sustainable the war effort will be — and how defense industries on both sides can continue to feed it.

“We’re moving from peacetime to wartime,” said Francois Heisbourg, a senior adviser at the Paris-based Foundation for Strategic Research think tank. “Peacetime means low production rates, and ramping up the production rate means that you have to first build industrial facilities … This is a defense-industrial challenge which is of a very great magnitude.”

That, in part, explains why Western deliveries of much-ballyhooed support for Ukraine have often fallen short and are slow in coming.

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany last week issued a “Ukraine Support Tracker” that showed the U.S. has delivered about half of its pledged commitments in military support for Ukraine, and Germany about one-third. Poland and Britain had both delivered on much of what they had promised, the report showed.

Earlier this month, Ukraine’s ambassador in Madrid, Serhii Phoreltsev, thanked Spain — which trumpeted shipment of 200 tons of military aid in April — but said the ammunition that was included was only enough for “about two hours of combat.”