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EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell

Photo: Nicolas Landemard / Le Pictorium / IMAGO

One million artillery shells for Kiev within a year: the EU had set itself this ambitious goal by March of this year. Nothing will come of this - that's what EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell announced on the sidelines of a meeting of defense ministers in Brussels. The deadline for supplying ammunition to Ukraine will be postponed until the end of the year.

Of the promised quantity of one million shots, only a little more than half will probably have been delivered by March, said Borrell. The new goal is now to reach the one million mark at least this year. According to Borrell, member states have pledged to deliver around 630,000 more bullets between March and then. Then there will be more than a million.

On March 20 last year, the EU states promised Ukraine that they would provide one million new artillery shells for the defensive war against Russia within twelve months. They should be organized from the stocks of the member states, but also through new joint procurement projects and prevent shortages of the Ukrainian armed forces.

According to the latest figures from the EU Foreign Service, only around 330,000 of the promised artillery shells have been delivered so far. Another 200,000 or so are expected to follow within the twelve-month period. Then we will probably have achieved a little more than 52 percent of the goal, said Borrell. He also announced that another 20,000 Ukrainian soldiers would be trained by EU countries. So far there have been 40,000.

Pistorius had predicted failure

Federal Defense Minister Boris Pistorius had already predicted that the ambitious plans would fail last year. «The one million will not be reached. “You have to assume that,” said the SPD politician in November. He cited insufficient production capacity as the reason.

However, politicians from countries like Estonia and Borrell also repeatedly gave other reasons. Borrell emphasized several times that, in his opinion, the problem was not industrial capacity and pointed out that significant quantities of ammunition produced in the EU were delivered to other countries due to existing contracts. The Estonian government, among others, therefore suggested conducting negotiations with these buyer countries or buying ammunition from third countries.

col/dpa/Reuters