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To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

Will Durant

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US and Europe are desperate to sign weapons deals for Ukraine. They just can’t get started.

Highly-touted co-production deals have been slow to get underway.SHARE
Free article usually reserved for subscribershttps://www.politico.eu/cdn-cgi/image/width=1160,height=773,quality=80,onerror=redirect, format=auto/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/15/GettyImages-1998707238.jpgAs the war in Ukraine continues, resources are not as quickly replenished as they are used Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images
FEBRUARY 15, 2024 7:29 PM CET
BY PAUL MCLEARYEveryone agrees that American and European defense companies need to work together to build new weapons and technologies for themselves and Ukraine. But no one has quite figured out how.

The war in Ukraine has chewed through millions of artillery shells, rockets and missiles that aren’t quickly replaceable in the peacetime footing across U.S. and European defense industries.

And while Russia has gone all in on replacing its losses, the West has been slower, with progress often measured in meetings, rather than new production lines.

The stakes for increasing the production of munitions and air defenses can already be seen in places such as Ukraine, Israel and in the Red Sea, where the proliferation of relatively cheap and mass-produced Iranian drones and missiles are forcing the expenditure of expensive air defenses and munitions to defeat them. And as countries run low on existing weapons, they need to figure out ways to work together to make more quickly.

Doing deals

The topic of striking co-production deals will be one of the big agenda items this weekend at the Munich Security Conference, where government, military, and industry leaders are gathered to take stock of the war in Ukraine, and consider the state of the democratic Western order more broadly.

But a mix of national politics, onerous export rules and broken supply chains continue to hound the effort even as worries increase over stockpiles depleted by the war in Ukraine, along with Kyiv’s need to have reliable partners to rebuild its own industrial production.

“Everybody has challenges with their workforce, everybody has a challenge with access to capital, everybody has a problem with consistent demand signals from the governments in question,” said one U.S. defense industry adviser who was granted anonymity in order to offer a frank assessment. “It doesn't matter what color the flag is on the flagpole in front of your business, everybody has the same problems.”

And how to pay for it all is a major sticking point.

“The issue is not having two partners who are willing to co-produce an item — there are willing participants — but there's got to be money in there somewhere and there just isn't, so it's been very frustrating,” said Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official focused on NATO issues.

Many of the officials gathering in Munich are coming from Brussels, where NATO defense ministers huddled on Thursday to talk about spending and investments in helping build up individual members of the alliance.

After years of complaints from Washington and sharp resentments within the alliance itself over individual defense budgets, more NATO allies have started investing more on their militaries, or are at least promising to.

Warning lights have been flashing red across the alliance since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when the bill for years of underspending on defense across Europe suddenly came due.

European leaders rushed to huddle with defense industry executives to find new ways to fund production lines and scour long-ignored sources of artillery, munitions and anti-tank weapons as Ukraine’s forces blunted the initial Russian thrust on Kyiv.

Now, with empty warehouses across the Continent and some older manufacturing lines only intermittently sputtering to life, the question is: Can the U.S. and Europe build replacement equipment fast enough?

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The pullback, announced as Ukraine faces acute shortages of ammunition with U.S. military aid delayed for months in Congress, aimed to save troops from being fully surrounded by Russian forces after months of fierce fighting, Kyiv said.

Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who took command of the Ukrainian military in a major shake-up last week, said Ukrainian forces had moved back to more secure positions outside the town, which had a pre-war population of 32,000.

"I decided to withdraw our units from the town and move to defence from more favourable lines in order to avoid encirclement and preserve the lives and health of servicemen," he was quoted as saying in an armed forces statement.


The pullback, announced as Ukraine faces acute shortages of ammunition with U.S. military aid delayed for months in Congress, aimed to save troops from being fully surrounded by Russian forces after months of fierce fighting, Kyiv said.

Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who took command of the Ukrainian military in a major shake-up last week, said Ukrainian forces had moved back to more secure positions outside the town, which had a pre-war population of 32,000.

"I decided to withdraw our units from the town and move to defence from more favourable lines in order to avoid encirclement and preserve the lives and health of servicemen," he was quoted as saying in an armed forces statement.

The pullback, announced as Ukraine faces acute shortages of ammunition with U.S. military aid delayed for months in Congress, aimed to save troops from being fully surrounded by Russian forces after months of fierce fighting, Kyiv said.

Colonel-General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who took command of the Ukrainian military in a major shake-up last week, said Ukrainian forces had moved back to more secure positions outside the town, which had a pre-war population of 32,000.

Nearly two years since Russia's full-scale invasion, the withdrawal is the clearest sign yet of how the tide of the war has turned in Moscow's favour after a Ukrainian counteroffensive failed to break through Russian lines last year.

The withdrawal was conducted according to plan, but some Ukrainian soldiers were captured by Russia in the final stages, Brigadier-General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi said, without specifying how many.