CNN :
Artem spends a lot of time thinking about the shots he can’t afford to take.
As a battery commander in the 26th Artillery Brigade of the Ukrainian military, he decides when his gunners fire and when they need to hold off.
Lately, it’s been a lot more of the latter.
It’s a horrible feeling, Artem told CNN sitting at a makeshift desk in a narrow dugout just a few miles from the front line in eastern Ukraine. He sees what is happening on the battlefield on the screens in front of him and often receives requests for support directly from infantry units there.
“Last summer, we used 100 shells per day. The enemy infantry did not even think about moving here. They had no plans to advance because they knew that every unit that was here would use everything they had to repel their attack,” the 24-year-old, whose call sign is “Shaman,” said. He asked for his last name to not be published, for safety reasons.
These days, his men are forced to make do with a fraction of the amount of ammunition they used to have. That means they can only strike top priority targets, a limitation which is allowing Russian troops to slip through.
“In the past, if I saw their firing position, a dugout, machine guns… I would hit them. Now I don’t do that,” he said. “The priority is the tank, the gun – if it is firing, the multiple launch rocket systems. If I see infantry and no one gives me a command, then I don’t shoot, because we have to save the shells.”
It’s a scenario that’s playing out up and down the front lines in Ukraine. As the United States Congress stalls on US President Joe Biden’s request for an additional $60 billion in security assistance for Kyiv, Ukrainian commanders are facing tough choices on how to use the dwindling stockpiles of ammunition.
Kyiv suffered its most significant loss in recent months last week when its troops abandoned Avdiivka, a town that has been on the front lines since Russian-backed separatists seized control of parts of the eastern Donbas region in 2014.
Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told CNN that Avdiivka would not have been lost if Ukraine “had received all the artillery ammunition that we needed to defend it.”