In order to meet the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ enormous demand for artillery ammunition and to balance the supply of available ammunition, the Czech government launched the “Czech ammunition initiative” in the spring of 2024.
The original plan was “merely” to finance and supply a total of 800,000 artillery shells, made up of 500,000 155 mm shells and 300,000 122 mm shells.
However, over the past two years, billions of euros have been invested in the initiative, enabling an incredible 4.4 million large-calibre rounds to be delivered to the Ukrainian Armed Forces by February 2026.
As artillery is one of the main areas of Germany’s support for Ukraine, it came as no surprise that Germany pledged own funding relatively quickly and, with 180,000 155 mm shells worth €576 million, even made the largest publicly known pledge to date.
But in the two years since the initial German funding commitment in March 2024, only very few further details have been released, and further commitments have merely been hinted at. At least until recently.
As the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence announced yesterday, Germany’s commitments under the Czech ammunition initiative now total almost €900 million, which in return means that the German government must have made at least one further pledge amounting to approximately €300 million, or that the total is spread across several as yet unknown pledges.
As of now, we can only speculate about the type of ammunition that was additionally funded. The German Ministry of Defence had not responded to a GAU enquiry seeking further information by the time this article was published.
Assuming that Germany has once again funded 155 mm artillery ammunition and that the known procurement prices under the initiative have not changed, €300 million would be equivalent to almost 94,000 artillery shells.
In the case of the 122 mm calibre, the figure would be more than 100,000 shells, which, unlike the 155 mm calibre, is not used in modern Western artillery systems but primarily in old Soviet artillery systems.
However, as already mentioned, at present we can only speculate as to the calibre of the ammunition that has been funded and how much ammunition has been funded.
Nevertheless, it is clear that the German government has allocated surprisingly little funding to the Czech ammunition initiative over the past two years, even though this initiative accounted for around 56% of the 155 mm ammunition supplies financed by Germany in 2024.
One likely explanation for this is that German defence giant Rheinmetall in particular has steadily increased its production output over the years and has therefore been able to secure an increasing number of large-scale contracts to supply the Ukrainian Armed Forces with modern 155 mm ammunition.
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