Send more 40 billions
Posted on 06/05/2022 2:26:13 PM PDT by Mount Athos
As the war in Ukraine passed a landmark 100th day this week, front-line fighters and volunteers say they are grappling with a dark and discouraging reality.
Despite pledges of tanks, artillery and — this week — U.S. rocket systems capable of hitting enemy Russian targets as far as 500 kilometres away, the Ukrainian front lines continue to be populated by at times dangerously ill-equipped fighters.
They are lacking bullets and extra magazines for their rifles, one Canadian fighter said.
They charge into battle in running shoes and mismatched uniforms, according to an American turning Ukrainians into combat medics.
Fighters with bulletproof vests and protective helmets are often indebted to private donors and Ukrainian business owners who have transformed their factories into makeshift production facilities.
“There’s a bunch of stuff that we’re missing for where we’re going,” said a Canadian fighter, a veteran of the French Foreign Legion, who spoke to the Star on condition of anonymity.
“I get that they’re doing the best that they can, but they’re kind of taking this idea of how the Ukrainians fight and operate and trying to force us into the same way of thinking. It’s pretty risky and it doesn’t really work.”
The Canadian said the more experienced foreign fighters, many of whom have been in Iraq or Afghanistan, are unwilling to rush into combat if they are not fully prepared and properly equipped.
“Then you’ve got the other group that is, like, ‘Oh, I just want to kill Russians! Send me to the front! I’m happy with only three magazines and an AK-47. I don’t need plates or a helmet,’ ” he told the Star.
“It’s those other ones that set the standard.”
The problems are most acute in the volunteer ranks, said Kurtis Pasqualle, a former U.S. combat medic who runs Operation Cavell, a group of international medical volunteers that train and fundraise for Ukrainian forces in battlefield medicine.
“We get two to three weeks to train these guys the best we can for what they’re going to face when they go to Donetsk or Kherson or anywhere like that to fight,” he told the Star from Tulsa, Okla., where he was picking up supplies to bring back to Ukraine.
A normal combat medic course might take as long as four months and include instruction on advanced first aid, starting an IV and administering medicine.
But acquiring powerful painkillers like morphine, fentanyl, ketamine and propofol, or Quikclot, a fast-acting agent that helps stop traumatic bleeding, is “next to impossible,” Pasqualle said.
And there is no time to spare.
“With the losses that are happening in these places, we need to put bodies in those holes to keep the offensive shut down. We don’t have the luxury of time,” he said. “We’re trying to find a balance between making (volunteers) ready and getting people out there.”
The disconnect between the weapons pledges made to Ukraine by western governments and the reality for tens of thousands of front-line fighters is jarring.
Canada has donated armoured vehicles, M777 Howitzers, 4,500 M72 rocket launchers, 7,500 hand grenades, 100 M2 Carl Gustav anti-tank weapons, sniper rifles, machine-guns, pistols, night-vision goggles, 1.5 million rounds of ammunition and 20,000 artillery rounds.
The U.S., which is leading the international effort to supply Ukraine’s military, this week promised to deliver four M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems as well as radar systems, additional Javelin anti-tank weapons and four Soviet-era helicopters.
And yet soldiers in Ukraine’s Territorial Defence Forces — local volunteer militias consisting of able-bodied fighters — are going without things such as headlamps, knee pads, boots and the most basic elements of protective equipment for a combat soldier, according to civilian donor groups contacted by the Star.
“Soldiers in the TDF are at the front lines — as I type this message — without vests,” said the founder of 688th Support Brigade, one of several aid groups trying to purchase and deliver material for soldiers fighting against the Russians.
Asking to remain anonymous, he described himself as a cryptocurrency investor with Polish ancestry who is raising funds from “high-net worth individuals” to buy items that are shipped from Poland into western Ukraine.
On May 29, a volunteer with the 688th Support Brigade group shared a video to the group’s Twitter account showing a Ukrainian soldier it said was a member of a reconnaissance unit. He holds a DJI Mini 2, a civilian drone that can be purchased in retail stores for $560. The soldier thanks the volunteer group by name.
“We purchased a drone for a recon unit with zero drones,” the 688th Support Brigade founder said in a written exchange with the Star. “The commander was literally crying that we could supply something that will keep his unit alive.”
Another Canadian volunteer fighter who recently returned home to Quebec from Ukraine said he experienced a number of equipment shortages when he was fighting with the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces in the Kyiv suburbs in March and, later, in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Wali, a former Canadian Armed Forces sniper, said soldiers were sent into battle with four spare magazines with bullets — less than half the minimum 10 magazines that Canadian soldiers carry into combat.
And instead of armoured vehicles, soldiers travelled between rear staging areas and command posts at the front in civilian cars and trucks that were invariably turned into wrecks within days from shrapnel, artillery or simple flat tires.
“I had a friend, a Ukrainian soldier, who bought himself a Mercedes,” Wali said. “He brought his car to an area about 15 or 20 kilometres behind the front, but there were so few vehicles that his commander ordered him to use his Mercedes to go on patrol. It took just a couple of days before his Mercedes was destroyed.”
Ukraine’s International Legion, which was created for foreign volunteers coming to defend Ukraine, recently launched a fundraising campaign seeking $15,000 to buy several inexpensive vehicles.
“The reality is that the First Battalion of the International Legion, currently on the front lines, is struggling to keep up with replacing the vehicles they lose,” the military unit said on its Facebook page, which also included photos of two wrecked SUVs.
There is suspicion, confusion and frustration about why Ukrainian soldiers — backed by the wealthiest countries and best-armed countries in the world — are having to defend against the Russian invasion in such an improvised manner.
Ryan Slobojan, a Toronto-based volunteer with Ukraine Aid Operations, a civilian group that buys and distributes protective equipment to Ukrainian troops, said the logistics problems are to be expected.
A February mobilization order, which called Ukrainian reservists and conscripts up for military service, combined with the influx of thousands of volunteer fighters and the targeted Russian attacks on Ukraine’s road and rail infrastructure has greatly complicated the task of transporting equipment, weapons and other supplies across the largest country in Europe.
Hanna Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy minister of defence, holds weekly briefings on the logistics situation and reports that thousands of bulletproof vests, helmets, uniforms and shoes are being acquired. But she has acknowledged problems.
The United Nations estimates that seven million people have fled Ukraine since the Russian invasion on Feb. 24. That has resulted in labour shortages — particularly of seamstresses capable of sewing military uniforms.
There is also a brutal reality: supplying an army in the midst of war is life-threatening work.
“Unfortunately, the Russian army is trying to destroy our reserves, and our logistics facilities are subject to missile fire, so we are taking measures to secure resources,” Malyar told reporters in a May 17 briefing.
But there are other troubling accounts, either of incompetence or interference.
The Canadian volunteer fighter and veteran of the French Foreign Legion said the American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles are being delivered to the front without enough lithium batteries, which are nonrechargeable and last just four hours.
“You need a stockpile of them,” he said. “When I spoke with one of the guys here, I asked, ‘Where are all the other batteries?’ … You’re supposed to have three or four in each case, but he only had the one.”
Pasqualle, the American combat medic trainer, said he had tried to raise issues about the equipment shortages with elected officials and the military chain of command.
“Nobody can give me an answer on who is responsible for distribution and sourcing,” he said.
On March 24, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law that threatens those who steal, sell or misuse humanitarian aid and charitable donations with up to 12 years in prison.
Yet several cases of alleged profiteering have emerged.
This week, the deputy head of the military administration in Chernivtsi, in western Ukraine, Artur Muntyan, was arrested for allegedly using donated ambulances to provide private, for-profit services rather than for their intended uses.
In April, the acting mayor of a city near Lviv, also in the west, was arrested on charges that he had accepted a bribe worth $4,300 from a charity group for the transfer of a minibus donated by a humanitarian group in Finland.
And police in the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia arrested a government employee last month for the illegal sale of firearms and ammunition. It is alleged that the head of a local rescue team was selling weapons intended to be used on the front against Russian soldiers, including an anti-tank grenade launcher, two Kalashnikov rifles and a quantity of rifle cartridges.
Ukraine has what the Global Organized Crime Index in 2021 called “one of the largest arms trafficking markets in Europe.” Experts have called for greater accountability and tighter controls over weapons shipments, in part to ensure that they are not diverted to the black market or for the personal profit of public officials.
Canada has no such system in place to track the fate of the weapons it has provided to the Ukrainian government.
In response to questions from the Star, the Department of National Defence said: “The donations of military aid are being provided exclusively to the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine, and these donations are controlled with end-user certificates provided by the MoD of Ukraine.”
The certificates simply confirm that the Ukrainian military has received the shipment.
Civilian aid groups say they are aware of the risks of theft or diversion and take care to hand off their supplies of donated gear only to trusted drivers attached to specific military units or at supply depots operated by those groups.
After 100 days of war, Wali noted that while life is returning to something like normal in Kyiv and in parts of western Ukraine that have been relatively untouched by war, a grimmer mood prevails on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides of the front lines.
“If you go to the front, people are depressed — a lot because it’s hard fighting on both sides,” he said. “Nobody’s laughing at the front on either side.”
Send more 40 billions
The reality of war is that you fight with the army you’ve got not the army you want.
Trudeau is just not doing enough!
Corrupt Ukrainians are selling US weapons to the Middle East.
Scrounging for bullets? Pull them from people shot dead.
The Canadian volunteer fighter and veteran of the French Foreign Legion said the American-made Javelin anti-tank missiles are being delivered to the front without enough lithium batteries, which are nonrechargeable and last just four hours.
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The important thing is it’s a zero-emissions weapons system.
The lucky ones take a bullet and die. The unlucky ones get to find out how Russia treats enemy mercenaries.
Bullets?
I didn’t buy an AK-74 because 5.45X39 wasn’t available... Thanks, Obama. That was 7 years ago.
Don’t look to the US for “Bullets”. We don’t have a square to spare.
LMAO. Been calling Ukraine a blackhole for a few months now.
“Despite pledges of tanks, artillery and — this week — U.S. rocket systems capable of hitting enemy Russian targets as far as 500 kilometres away,”
WTF?!?!
Did they sneak one by?
300 mile rockets. Nothing like that was supposed to be transferred.
Oh, and the reason they can get small arms rounds is that Russia is slowly, but effectively closing off all supply routes.
The Uke men in Donbas are dead meat. They just don’t know it yet.
Correct. Here's a picture of a bullet.
So the soldiers are not scrounging for bullets...they are scrounging for cartridges.
Yup. Most people have no clue. Anyone referring to a cartridge as a bullet, is a fool.
This might be the first mention since the war started of Ukrainian corruption. Considering before the war, the Ukraine was in competition with Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America for the most corrupt I am not surprised.
We’ve been hearing this for quite a while. Where are they?
One source I read indicated there were only two open paved roads from the west going into the Donbass.
The Russians are having a turkey shoot with any supply vehicles.
One source I read indicated there were only two open paved roads from the west going into the Donbass.
The Russians are having a turkey shoot with any supply vehicles.
Guessing that golden beam exiting at the top is the 10% for 'the Big Guy'...
;>)
Don’t forget 10% for the big gal.
I have never seen Nancy Pelosi looking so happy as during her visit to Zelensky. Not possible to make a bigger smile without getting rushed to plastic surgeon for heavy maintenance
People are not getting any smarter - I see more & more folks referring to projectiles as "bullet tips"...
;>)
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