After all, a single gun firing 50 shells a day is about as useful as two guns each firing 25.

For hundreds of years, artillery has dominated land warfare. Firing far and hitting hard, it’s the biggest killer of infantry, the main means of supporting an attack and the main means of supporting a defense.

It’s for that reason that, in charting the supply of artillery ammunition on both sides of a war, you can map the progress of that war. The side with the most shells is probably going to win.

And it’s why a surprise initiative, led by the Czech Republic and involving more than a dozen European countries, has been so critical to Ukraine’s survival as Russia’s wider war on the country grinds into its third year.

The Czechs found, for Ukraine, nearly a million shells precisely when Ukraine needed those million shells the most: at the peak of Russia’s winter offensive. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Czech artillery initiative probably saved entire Ukrainian cities, by giving the Ukrainian army the firepower to resist a much bigger Russian army.

It’s no secret how Ukraine got into an artillery bind late last year. In early 2023, according to The Washington Post, the United States quietly brokered a deal with South Korea – a country with sprawling artillery factories – to purchase, likely for billions of dollars, a whopping one million shells in the standard Nato 155mm calibre, now also the standard artillery round of Ukraine.

Those million shells, heaped on top of ammunition Ukraine was getting directly from the USA and European countries, freed Ukraine’s 3,000 or so howitzers to blast away at a rate of at least 10,000 rounds a day – matching, for the first time, the daily firing rate of Russia’s 6,000 howitzers.

For months, the Ukrainians at least achieved firepower parity with the Russians. While many analysts rate Ukraine’s mid-2023 counteroffensive, which liberated just a few hundred square miles in southern and eastern Ukraine, as a profound disappointment, even modest gains are preferable to losing ground.

And losing ground is exactly what the Ukrainians did after their counteroffensive petered out around October. That’s when the Russian army, swelling to nearly half a million deployed troops thanks to a nationwide mobilization, went on the attack. The Russians concentrated tens of thousands of their best-equipped troops for a drive on the most vulnerable Ukrainian city: Avdiivka, a former industrial center just a few miles from the front line in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk Oblast.

Those troops suffered astounding casualties – probably tens of thousands – but steadily advanced. They surely noticed that, with every day that passed as fall turned to winter, Ukraine’s artillery fire became more sporadic and, in some sectors, even fell completely silent.

To understand how Ukrainian howitzers that once fired non-stop eventually went idle, you have to understand American politics. Americans elect the US Congress every two years. And in 2022, they narrowly chose Republicans to lead the US House of Representatives, one of two houses of Congress. The presidency and the US Senate remained in the hands of the Democratic Party.

Before losing the House in November 2022, the Democrats approved $75 billion dollars in military aid to Ukraine. That aid began to run out in October. President Joe Biden promptly proposed an additional $61 billion in funding for Ukraine but, to the shock of the political mainstream in the USA, the Republican speaker of the house, Representative Mike Johnson, declined to exercise his exclusive authority to bring the aid to a vote. This, despite the fact that majorities of both parties were in favour.

Johnson told a lot of stories to explain his opposition to helping Ukraine, but they’re all spin. The simple truth is that disgraced ex-president Donald Trump, who is running for the presidency this year and is weirdly fond of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, voiced his ambivalence toward Ukraine. And Johnson translated that ambivalence into a one-man Congressional blockade of US support for Ukraine. Support that would have paid for hundreds of thousands of shells.

Ukraine began running out of ammo because that’s what Trump wanted. And because a European Union project to manufacture a million shells for Ukraine was six months late for its 2023 deadline, Ukraine’s daily artillery usage fell from 10,000 rounds to just 2,000 rounds, while Russia’s own usage remained elevated thanks to a huge ammo consignment from North Korea.

By mid-February, the Russians were on the march in and around Avdiivka. The ammo-starved Ukrainian garrison retreated – and kept retreating as the Russians’ momentum carried them farther and farther west.

But then, on Feb. 18, Czech defense policy chief Jan Jires shocked his audience when he announced – at a Munich security conference – that his government had identified 800,000 artillery shells “sitting in non-Western countries.” Those countries apparently include South Korea, Turkey and South Africa.

The shells could be had for $1.5 billion, Czech officials said.

“Most of these countries [are] unwilling to support Ukraine directly for political reasons so they need a middleman,” Jires said, according to Politico reporter Paul McLeary and other sources. The Czech Republic would be that middleman, if Ukraine’s allies – other than the USA, of course – would help to pay for the ammo.

Belgium, Canada, Denmark and The Netherlands quickly signed up. Soon, another 13 countries joined the Czech artillery club. In three weeks, Jires and his colleagues collected all $1.5 billion. Shells were on their way within weeks.

With months’ worth of shells on the way, Ukrainian brigades no longer had to conserve what little ammo they’d been saving for emergencies. In early March, Ukraine’s batteries opened fire.

Five miles west of Avdiivka, Ukrainian troops halted their retreat, turned and counterattacked. Finally enjoying something approaching adequate artillery support, they stopped the Russian offensive dead in its tracks in villages with names like Berdychi, Orlivka and Tonen’ke.

Artillery – a shortage of it – is the main reason the Ukrainians nearly lost a whole eastern oblast to the Russians this winter and spring. And artillery – a million shells brokered by a tiny Eastern European country – is the main reason the Ukrainians didn’t lose that whole oblast.

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