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We’re already seeing evidence of a shortfall: Russian troops riding into battle in unarmored freight trucks and even open-top golf carts that the Kremlin purchased from a Chinese company.

It should go without saying that golf carts don’t last long in combat with, say, Ukraine’s angriest anti-tank missile teams and most skilled drone operators. It doesn’t matter if the Russian army in Ukraine has 300,000 or 400,000 people if those people utterly lack protection on the battlefield.

The fragility of Russia’s army might be more evident if Ukraine’s own army weren’t starving for ammo and, at times, incapable of shooting back. When Ukraine’s 2023 offensive petered out late last year after achieving modest gains, Russia seized the initiative—and went on the attack all along the front line.

The timing couldn’t have been worse for the Ukrainians. At almost exactly the same moment in mid-October, Speaker of the House Johnson refused to bring to a vote the $60 billion in fresh funding U.S. president Joe Biden had proposed for Ukraine.

Johnson is a close ally of former president Donald Trump, who was impeached in 2019 for attempting to coerce Ukrainian officials to support a smear campaign targeting Trump’s political opponents. Trump has since called on Ukraine to surrender portions of its territory to Russia.

Deprived of the hundreds of thousands of artillery shells and thousands of surface-to-air missiles that Biden had hoped to buy for them, Ukrainian forces have had to make hard choices: retreating from positions that, with enough firepower, they might have held.

A 2,000-person Ukrainian garrison quit the city of Avdiivka in mid-February after inflicting tens of thousands of casualties on the attacking Russians—and then running out of ammo. Now another 2,000-person Ukrainian garrison faces the same terrible dilemma in the canal district of Chasiv Yar.

At the same time, Ukraine’s best air defense batteries have fallen silent for a want of American-made missiles. Ukraine’s biggest cities—Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa—are increasingly defenseless as more Russian missiles and bombs pummel them.

Six hundred Ukrainian civilians, including children, died in air raids in March. A missile raid on Kyiv last night destroyed the city’s biggest power plant, casting thousands of homes, and vital weapons workshops, into darkness. “More air defense, and our assistance, is needed now,” Bridget Brink, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, pleaded yesterday.

Ukrainian troops are losing ground, but they’re losing ground to legions of poorly-trained Russian troops riding in antique vehicles. They’re losing ground only because they’re running out of ammo. Ukrainians’ “ability to defend their terrain that they currently hold and their air space would fade rapidly—will fade rapidly—without ... continued U.S. support,” Cavoli said.
Conversely, with U.S. support, a rearmed Ukrainian military could protect its cities from Russian raids and, on the front line, achieve firepower superiority over a Russian military that’s fast running out of modern weapons.

The choice, tragically, isn’t the Ukrainians’ to make. It’s up to one man, an American. The leader of a thin Republican majority in one house of the U.S. Congress.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, for one, understands the politics and the stakes. “If Ukraine's partners act decisively, I am confident that we can defeat Russian terror before it spreads further,” Zelensky wrote today."

Note: In the above article Forbes appear to make use of fairly optimistic numbers. Estimates of how long Ruzzia can draw on old stock vary, with 18-24 months also mentioned by analysts as a "moderate" forecast.