Peter Paul (Photo: Sean Gallup / Getty Images)
This was stated by Czech President Petr Pavel in an interview with the Financial Times. According to Pavel, if last year 18 countries were involved in the initiative, now only nine countries continue to make financial contributions. This, he said, is worrying because of the uneven distribution of the financial burden. “This initiative supplies Ukrainians with up to 50% of all large caliber ammunition, so in this sense it cannot be easily replaced by something else,” the Czech President stressed. He also said that the future of the program is planned to be discussed during the July NATO summit in Ankara.
The Czech president’s office did not specify which states had stopped participating in the initiative. At the same time, an unnamed Western military official quoted by the FT said that Germany and some Scandinavian countries remain among the participants. According to him, some of the partners “consider it strange to pay for something that does not even have the proper support of the leading country’s senior politicians.”
Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš criticized the initiative during the election campaign and said it could be canceled, citing “insufficient transparency in the use of funds.” Subsequently, the government refused to take such a step. In a commentary to the FT, Babiš explained that the government is focusing primarily on the country’s domestic needs, in particular support for citizens amid rising energy costs after the war in Iran.
Michal Strnad, CEO of defense company Czechoslovak Group, said the initiative is still in place, although its pace has slowed. According to him, it is too early to say whether it will affect the volume of ammunition supplies to Ukraine, as individual states have started buying shells directly from manufacturers or other suppliers.
The possibility of purchasing 800,000 shells for Ukraine was first announced by Czech President Petr Pavel on February 17, 2024. He said that he found half a million pieces of ammunition of 155 mm caliber and 300 thousand – of 122 mm caliber. A number of European states joined his initiative. Then about 20 countries, in particular Canada, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belgium, Finland, Portugal, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain and Slovenia joined the Czech initiative to purchase ammunition for Ukraine. In February 2026, Petro Pavel said that Ukraine had received 4.4 million large-caliber shells since the initiative’s inception, of which less than 2 million in 2025.
