Ukraine Orders Evacuation From Several Eastern Towns: Governor

By AFP - Agence France Presse
August 4, 2024
[size=33px]Ukraine on Sunday announced the mandatory evacuation of children and their guardians from areas in the Donetsk region, where Russia has been claiming advances in recent days.[/size][size=33px]"The enemy is bombing the towns and villages of these communities every day, so it was decided to evacuate children with their parents or other legal representatives," Donetsk governor Vadym Filashkin said, listing towns and villages located in directions where Russia said it had gained ground.[/size]

“This is the first tranche of direct budget support from the United States in 2024,” stated Shmyhal on Telegram. “In total, Ukraine will receive $7.8 billion in direct budgetary assistance from the United States this year, which will allow us to confidently pass this financial period.”

Over the past few days, Russian forces have made significant progress in the Donetsk region, advancing in the area of seven settlements, according to reports from Deep State.

The Russian army is pushing westward toward Pokrovsk, a crucial logistics hub for Ukrainian forces in Donbas, and continues its offensive west of the city of Donetsk and near the administrative border of the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions. Ukrainian counterattacks involving tanks were not able to halt the Russian advance.

Russian forces are assaulting from three axes in the Pokrovsk area, attacking from the north and bypassing from the east. Assault operations are also ongoing west of Serhiivka.

The situation around Toretsk has worsened as well. According to Meduza frontline situation analysis, Russian troops have advanced several kilometers west of Zalizne toward Niu-York, attempting to connect with forces storming Zalizne.

This movement threatens to encircle Ukrainian troops fortified in positions established since 2015. If the Russian advance continues at this pace, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) may soon need to retreat from these positions.

Toretsk itself remains under Ukrainian control but has endured massive shelling for over a month, with attacks from both artillery and aircraft using guided bombs.

The proximity to the front line has also allowed Russian forces to deploy FPV drones targeting Ukrainian armored and civilian vehicles.

Deep State’s Telegram channel noted on August 4: “The enemy seems to have broken through the chain. Assault operations north of Zhelanne continue. In addition, the enemy has a tactical success east of the village and is making an attempt to bypass it.”

Analysts also report Russian progress in the settlements of Ivanivka and Lysychne, with assaults on Ivanivka and attempts to bypass Lysychne from the south.

The AFU’s defensive crisis is intensifying in a 100-kilometer arc around Avdiivka. Following the capture of the village of Prohres between Avdiivka and Pokrovsk in late July, Russian forces have targeted the flanks and rear of Ukrainian units, forcing them to abandon positions

The brewing defensive crisis near Pokrovsk, Toretsk, and Chasiv Yar is compounded by challenges in other areas, particularly in the southern Donbas. The AFU commanders face significant challenges in stabilizing the situation.

A REUTERS INVESTIGATION

Years of miscalculations by U.S., NATO led to dire shell shortage in Ukraine

A Ukrainian serviceman prepares 155mm shells at a position late last year near the town of Marinka in the Donetsk region. The 155mm shell has becomes a pivotal weapon in the ongoing war with Russia. REUTERS/Viacheslav RatynskyiSince Russia seized Crimea in 2014, policymakers in America and Europe repeatedly failed to address warnings about the sorry condition of the West’s munitions industry. The result: an inability to adequately supply Ukraine with a key weapon, and a shift of the war in Russia’s favor.

By [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]

Filed July 19, 2024, 8 a.m. GMT

KRAMATORSK, UKRAINE

On the frontlines near this old industrial city, soldiers in the trenches say a shortage of an all-important munition – the 155 millimeter artillery shell – has turned the war in Russia’s favor.

Many of them blamed the supply crunch on the U.S. Congress for failing to quickly approve a $60 billion military aid package, which passed after months of delay in April. The U.S. and European nations have pledged that assistance is on its way. But while fresh supplies have been delivered, Ukraine is still massively outgunned.

The causes of the shell crisis began years ago. They are rooted in decisions and miscalculations made by the U.S. military and its NATO allies that occurred well before Russia’s 2022 invasion, a Reuters investigation found.

A decade of strategic, funding and production mistakes played a far greater role in the shell shortage than did the recent U.S. congressional delays of aid, Reuters found.

In the years between Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and its 2022 invasion, for example, repeated warnings from top NATO commanders and from officials who operated or supervised U.S. munitions plants went largely unheeded. They advised their governments, both publicly and privately, that the alliance’s munitions industry was ill-equipped to surge production should war demand it. Because of the failure to respond to those warnings, many artillery production lines at already-ancient factories in the United States and Europe slowed to a crawl or closed altogether.

“This is a problem that’s been long in the making,” said Bruce Jette, who served as the assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for acquisition, logistics and technology from 2018 to January 2021.

Reuters interviewed dozens of current and former U.S., Ukrainian and North Atlantic Treaty Organization military officials, and reviewed thousands of pages of confidential U.S. Army briefings, public documents and other internal records. The reporting found that:

Production of the 155mm shell dropped so dramatically that, from summer 2014 to fall 2015, the U.S. added no new shells to its stockpile.

Manufacturing defects and safety violations triggered repeated production-line shutdowns. The 2021 discovery of cracks in shells cut production capacity in half for months.

A U.S. decision to change the type of explosive used in those shells hasn’t helped the war effort and, to date, has been an expensive flop: The Army spent $147 million on a facility it doesn’t use.

And a plan to replace an antiquated plant in Virginia that produced propellant to launch the shells has fallen a decade behind its scheduled completion and has almost doubled in price. That delay has created a greater U.S. reliance on raw materials from overseas than is publicly known. One internal U.S. Army document from 2021 details “foreign dependencies” on at least a dozen chemicals made in China and India, countries with close trade ties to Russia.

Particularly ironic: The U.S. pre-war plan for sourcing the explosive TNT from overseas included contracts with a factory in eastern Ukraine. The plant was seized by Russia early in the war.


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Some defense analysts say second-guessing decisions that led to the supply crunch is overly simplistic. “It’s easy to criticize leaders of the past for not consistently funding munitions. Clearly, the industrial base would be in a better place today if they had done so,” said Cynthia Cook, who directs the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. The key, she said, is to understand that there are always trade offs, and there would have been weapons or tools the military would have been unable to fund had it upgraded its ammunition production facilities.

But Lord David Richards, a former British chief of the defense staff and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said that since the end of the Cold War, politicians in Western nations have frequently overruled the advice of “the more capable NATO commanders.” Those commanders, he said, had warned of the dangers of not keeping artillery ammunition stocks higher.

Instead, Richards said, policymakers took what he called a “production gamble” by assuming militaries could restart production in time for when the munitions were needed

Even before funding from the U.S. Congress was delayed, the Ukrainians had been told by U.S. officials that shells could not be produced quickly enough to meet their military needs, said Volodymyr Havrylov, who served as Ukraine’s deputy defense minister for the first 18 months of the war.

“It’s very important for our infantry to hear the sound of our artillery every hour just to understand that they are not alone in the field and there are guys behind them who are ready to support them,” Havrylov said.

By summer 2023, however, U.S. officials told Ukraine that its forces should be ready for a reduced supply of shells in 2024 – barely half of the 2 million rounds of 155mm they ended up receiving in 2023.

Havrylov said U.S. officials told him that “we should adjust our warfare approach” and “live with” a reduced supply of shells.

In 2020, two years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, U.S. Army assistant secretary Jette sent a civilian adviser on a mission. Jette ordered adviser Joseph Amadee to visit America’s ammunition plants to answer two fundamental questions: Does the U.S. have enough ammunition on hand for war? And if not, can America’s industrial base move quickly if war breaks out and more ammunition is urgently needed?

Amadee, a former PepsiCo and Pillsbury factory executive, had served in the Army and later as an adviser in Iraq. He said he was appalled by what he found.

Among the locations he toured were three U.S. munition plants critical to producing the 155mm rounds. The shells contain a high explosive that shatters their metal casing into lethal shrapnel. They are fired from cannons with bags of gunpowder, the propellant.

Those three elements – the carefully forged shell casings, the high explosives, and the supplies of the powder to launch the projectiles – have proved crucial since World War I. Also essential: efficient production lines to assemble those components.

As he made his tours, Amadee told Reuters, he came across problems he found absurd. In Tennessee, he walked the floor of a new but idled $147 million factory built for use in the explosives process. Parts of the plant were literally gathering cobwebs, he recalled.

In Pennsylvania, he toured a dilapidated shell-casing factory first used for the Korean War. It had been lightly used by the military for years in the mid-2010s and was now limping along with no significant upgrades funded. In Iowa, he was briefed on manufacturing flaws, including cracked 155mm shells, that shut down one production line for months. And in Virginia, he visited a $399 million construction project running a decade behind schedule, significantly over budget and still struggling to produce the propellant needed to launch the 155mm shell.

Amadee, whose tenure from 2018 to early 2022 spanned Republican and Democrat administrations, said troops on Ukraine’s front lines are now paying the price for a failure to keep 155mm production lines prepared for war.

It is a scenario supervisors at the factories, contractors and Army officials openly dreaded in the years before the war, Amadee said.

“We were talking about it all the time: ‘What are we going to do if we get into a war here? We can’t just ramp this stuff up in one day. We’re in a bad situation,’” he recalled.

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In a forest in western Poland, a complex on the same site where a factory was built by Nazi German occupiers to support an invasion of the Soviet Union now makes thousands of tons of TNT every year. The problem for Ukraine is that the factory, located near the city of Bydgoszcz, is the last surviving TNT plant in Europe or North America.

Workers there now work around the clock. It’s run by a state-owned company, Nitro-Chem, and makes about 10,000 tons of TNT per year. The company declined to say exactly how much. A single 155mm round typically requires about 10 kg of TNT. That means that the 10,000 tons of TNT would be enough to provide for about 1 million rounds, if every bit were used for 155mm shells.

Much of the TNT made in Poland is shipped to the U.S., according to staff at the plant. It is then packed into shells with other ingredients and added to the shrinking U.S. Army stockpile. The oldest shells are shipped back to Poland and then on to Ukraine.

Few countries today produce TNT, primarily because of environmental concerns about contamination from the highly toxic chemicals produced in the manufacturing process.

Germany closed its last TNT plant, Schönebeck on the Elbe, in 1990. And in Britain, a TNT plant at Bridgewater in Somerset was closed in 2008, the last of at least four TNT factories in the country dating to World War II.

Besides the plant in Poland, production of TNT is now concentrated in China and India. Customs records examined by Reuters show at least 1,200 tons of TNT were exported from India in 2023 and 2024 to arms makers that supply Western forces. India also shipped large volumes of the explosive fillers RDX and HMX to Poland’s Nitro-Chem.

But both India and China also have tried to maintain good relations with Russia. And neither likely would be able to fill NATO’s needs, even if willing. “You cannot imagine just how overheated the market is at the moment,” said a European defense industry executive. “The worst thing at the moment is the global shortage of TNT and RDX. The shortage of these raw materials is the basic reason why production cannot be ramped up much more at this point.”

One factor behind America’s TNT shortage dates back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. No facility in the U.S. has made TNT since 1986. The Army relied on imports instead



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​​​​​​​“Amateurs worry about strategy. Dilettantes worry about tactics. Professionals worry about logistics.” – Unknown. “

You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics.” – General Dwight D Eisenhower

Russian forces have reportedly completed and launched a new railway from Rostov to the occupied city of Mariupol, according to Petro Andryushchenko, the adviser to the mayor of Mariupol.

"Silently and secretly, without announcements and red ribbons, the railway was launched," Andryushchenko reported on Telegram.

He noted that this new railway could significantly impact the front line by improving Russian logistics.

"This is not an alternative to the Crimean Bridge," he stated. "It is an independent, autonomous branch with greater capacity."

In March, British intelligence reported that Russia was building a railway through the occupied territories of Ukraine to provide an alternative route for delivering military equipment.



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