Europe’s production of artillery ammunition is on track to double as the region’s industry overcomes an initial struggle to ramp up output in efforts to help Ukraine’s war effort and boost the continent’s supplies, Estonia’s defense chief said.
(Bloomberg) — Europe’s production of artillery ammunition is on track to double as the region’s industry overcomes an initial struggle to ramp up output in efforts to help Ukraine’s war effort and boost the continent’s supplies, Estonia’s defense chief said.
“We see that European industrial capacities have gone up, so this is a positive trend,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said in an interview Monday. “Probably by the end of the year — or the beginning of next year — we can produce almost double the size we were producing in Europe compared to a year ago.”
The European Union has sought to rapidly boost production of 155mm artillery shells, both to maintain aid to Kyiv and refill stocks, as Ukraine and Russia burn through ammunition in a war of attrition. But years of limited weapons spending left Europe’s defense industry ill equipped to quickly ramp up production after Russia invaded Ukraine last year.
Pevkur didn’t elaborate on the volumes the industry was expected to reach, but an Estonian policy document sent to member states earlier this year said the bloc had capacity to produce about 300,000 shells per year.
Doubling that figure would mean producing as many as 600,000 shells by the end of this year, with output continuing to grow. A person familiar with the matter said capacity is expected to hit 1 million shells next year.
Nevertheless, the EU is lagging behind in its pledge to send Ukraine 1 million rounds of artillery shells by February, a plan adopted earlier this year based on an Estonian proposal. Ukraine’s military has urgently pleaded for more ammunition for its counteroffensive, a grinding bid to break through Russian defensive lines and seize back occupied territory.
So far, the bloc has spent around half of the €2 billion ($2.2 billion) set aside for the efforts, but has only delivered some 224,000 ammunition rounds and 2,300 missiles from existing stocks to Ukraine, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said in late August.
EU officials say they are concerned that member states have so far only sent a quarter of the ammunition target to Ukraine and will fall short of the goal.
The remainder of the EU funding has been set aside to encourage joint procurement of ammunition by the bloc’s member states. Pevkur urged countries to sign contracts with defense companies to further ramp up production.
“We have to use all the possibilities to achieve these 1 million rounds” for Ukraine, the Estonian minister said by phone.
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