Russia sources ammunition faster than west, says Prague

Russia is beating western capitals in securing artillery supplies on international markets, the Czech government has said, warning that delayed payments to arms companies could lead to millions of ammunition rounds being sent to Moscow instead of Kyiv.

Prague is coordinating purchases of ammunition from arms companies in non-Nato countries on behalf of many western allies, but is struggling to compete with Moscow, which has proved it can get financing to manufacturers faster.

“There are some countries that are supplying [Ukraine] from the same stockpiles that the Russians are [buying from],” Tomáš Kopečný, Prague’s envoy for the reconstruction of Ukraine, told journalists Thursday. “If you have the cash to do the pre-payment faster than the Russians, then the products go to the Ukrainian side. If you don’t have the cash on the account, then sometimes it goes to the Russians.”

The Czech warning comes as its domestic arms producer Czechoslovak Group, the largest ammunition supplier in central Europe, warned that rising prices and poor quality meant that half the shells it had received could not be sent to Ukraine’s battlefields as quickly as planned.

Michal Strnad, owner and chair of CSG, told the Financial Times that about 50 per cent of the parts acquired by his company on behalf of the Czech government in places such as Africa and Asia were not good enough to be sent to Ukraine without further work. For some shells, CSG is being forced to add missing components from its own production.

“Every week the price is going up and there are big issues with the components,” Strnad said during an interview in his company’s Prague offices. “It’s not an easy job.”

However, he stressed that the Czech initiative remained “on track” and that CSG was committed to delivering its assigned part of the supplies.

The war in Ukraine has helped to send prices soaring for the limited number of shells that could be purchased outside of Nato states at a time when there is no spare ammunition or production capacity in Europe.

“The production capacity is out there. But it is not in Europe,” Kopečný said. “There are single-digit millions of rounds of ammunition that we are competing [with Russia] for . . . The only thing we need for that is corresponding finances.”

Strnad said that the order books of European ammunition makers were full for up to the next eight years, depending on the type of parts, even as “all of us are increasing the capacities”.

Even in the unlikely scenario of Ukraine’s war finishing right now, he said, “there will be huge work in front of us to replenish the strategic stocks of Nato countries”.

EU leaders from the Netherlands, Denmark, Latvia and Poland, along with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, attended a dinner in Prague hosted by Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala on Tuesday to discuss Ukraine’s weapons shortfall, which is crippling its efforts to fight Russia.

Fiala said that 15 EU and Nato countries had so far contributed €1.6bn to the Czech initiative, which was announced in February and aims to provide 1.5mn artillery shells to Ukraine. A first batch of tens of thousands of 155mm calibre shells would be delivered next month to Ukraine, Fiala said. 

The Czech government has asked CSG and other smaller Czech defence companies to act as intermediaries and source the shells from countries outside the EU.

Strnad said he was in separate discussions with authorities in Kyiv to start building facilities in Ukraine that could make CSG the first EU defence company to produce large-calibre shells in Ukraine.

As part of the plans, CSG would build a factory in Ukraine, a truck assembly line and a maintenance facility to handle weapons delivered to Kyiv. CSG would spend “a few hundred million euros” to launch its three Ukrainian manufacturing projects and was hoping to reach an agreement with Kyiv this year.

Ukraine has been struggling to contain Russia on the battlefield largely because of a shortfall of soldiers and ammunition. Strnad said he had warned policymakers two years ago that access to artillery shells could define the outcome of the war, but to little avail.

“They didn’t think that there could be some war where artillery would play the major role. Everybody thought about drones, artificial intelligence and new trends,” he said. 

Shmyhal underlined on Tuesday the need not only for fresh artillery ammunition to reach Ukraine’s front lines as soon as possible, but also for Nato allies to respond to Kyiv’s request for seven additional Patriot air defence systems and more fighter jets.