The lack of ammunition — especially in the artillery sector — is currently one of Ukraine’s biggest problems on the battlefield. To meet this demand, the German government regularly concludes new contracts for Ukraine.
Two of these contracts were concluded in the last few days.
Last week, on Thursday 14th of December 2023, the German Ministry of Defence announced that the Bundestag’s budget committee had approved a framework contract for the production of artillery ammunition for Ukraine.
An unnamed French defence company is to take over the production and delivery of the 68,000 155 mm shells. The cost of the order is 278 million euros, which is around 4,100 euros per shell. Unfortunately, there is no information about the delivery timeframe.
A total of up to 350,000 shells could be ordered under the framework contract. Interestingly, it was also announced that other countries could order from this framework contract, as this is part of the EU plan to supply 1 million artillery shells to Ukraine.
In reverse, of course, this means that at least this one company was sitting on a capacity of 350,000 shells and nobody in the EU or NATO ordered them — not even the French themselves.
Today, Rheinmetall announced on their website that they have also received a new order from the German government to supply artillery ammunition to Ukraine.
Rheinmetall is talking about tens of thousands of 155 mm artillery shells of different types worth hundreds of millions of euros to be delivered over the course of 2025.
In October, Rheinmetall was just awarded two contracts by the German government for the supply of approximately 200,000 shells of 155 mm artillery ammunition to Ukraine over the course of 2023 and 2024.
The 2025 delivery timeframe that has now been announced suggests that Rheinmetall’s order books for 155 mm artillery ammunition are already full for the entire year 2024 — which is a good sign.
Further proof of this theory is another contract with an unnamed NATO member for the delivery of a five-digit amount of artillery shells to Ukraine, which was announced at the beginning of December. There, too, Rheinmetall already wrote about a delivery which takes place in 2025.
How many of the total of up to 700,000 planned artillery shells produced in 2024 will be delivered to Ukraine remains a secret, but it can be assumed that were are at least talking about several hundred thousand of them.
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