For more than a year, a Czech program that scours the world for ammunition has been a crucial supply line for Ukrainian forces desperately in need of artillery.
But little is publicly known about the program, and its opacity may be its undoing.
If an opposition populist party prevails in this week’s parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic — as it appears poised to do — its leaders have vowed either to disband the ammunition program or to ask NATO to run it so they can concentrate on the country’s wobbly economy.
With consumer prices rising, “obviously people are getting more and more nervous,” said Jaroslav Bzoch, a member of the European Parliament from the populist party, Ano. The party has derided the ammunition program not just as overpriced but also as opaque because of its reliance on shadowy business deals.
Other NATO nations have already recalibrated military spending in the face of war-weary publics that want to focus on domestic priorities. At the same time, Ukraine depends heavily on Western military support, and Russia is pressing forward with the war, trying to seize as much Ukrainian land as it can.
Officials and experts said the ammunition program, which relies on billions of dollars in donations from NATO countries, costs Czech taxpayers relatively little. But even the perception that it could further bog down the economy has stuck with voters who Mr. Bzoch said were already skeptical of the program.
Those who want the ammunition program to continue say Ano is playing on voters’ fatigue with the war in Ukraine.
“People are getting tired, and it’s misused for the political campaign,” said Ales Vytecka, a senior official in the Czech Defense Ministry. He said that helping Ukraine should have support “because it’s our national security interest.”
The Czech ammunition initiative was created in early 2024 when Ukraine was running out of artillery, particularly the NATO-standard 155-millimeter shells to fit large-caliber guns donated by Western countries.
At the time, American military aid to Ukraine was held up in Congress. European arsenals were dangerously low after two years of sending their own weapons to Ukraine and unable to quickly ramp up production to build more ammunition.
And Russia was gaining ground, pushing back Ukraine’s forces.
But there was more artillery available in the world — including from countries that have ongoing diplomatic or even warm relations with Russia. From its years as a Soviet satellite state, the Czech Republic and its weapons manufacturers had maintained contacts with Russia’s allies and quietly reached out to see whether they were interested in selling ammunition to be sent to Ukraine.
They were — so long as the Czech government made sure the countries were never identified, to spare them from Russia’s anger.
With that assurance, “the sources just started to be like wasps on the candy, just going after the sweet,” said Mr. Vytecka, director of the Defense Ministry’s international cooperation agency.
Since then, Mr. Vytecka said, NATO countries have donated enough money to procure more than 2.5 million pieces of ammunition for the program, all from non-NATO nations. Sales are projected to increase this year, he said, and the alliance donors appear willing to continue paying.
The influx has largely allowed Ukraine to hold the line against Russia.
“Without the ammunition provided through this initiative, Ukraine would have already lost the Donbas,” the Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavsky, told an International Institute of Strategic Studies forum in Prague this month. He was referring to the eastern territory in Ukraine that has seen the bloodiest battles of the three-year war.
Mark Rutte, the NATO secretary general, said that the Czech Republic’s “unique ammunition initiative” was a prime example of “essential” support to Ukraine.
Yet the secrecy that has made the Czech ammunition initiative a success also prompted lawmakers to raise questions about its legitimacy.
Precisely where the ammunition comes from remains publicly unknown. Much of it was bought in Africa, Asia and South America, said Jan Jires, a former senior official at the Czech Defense Ministry who worked on the effort.
Officials will not disclose exactly how much money NATO allies have paid, though Mr. Jires described it as several billion dollars. He said that the Czech Republic’s own contributions were relatively small; in June 2024, a few months after the program began, Prime Minister Petr Fiala said his country had at that point given about $41 million.
The money is moved through Czech weapons manufacturers that have the contacts with the global sellers. Mr. Jires said that those companies bought the ammunition, ensured it was functional and then shipped it to Ukraine.
Last year, a Czech senator raised concerns that the Czech companies were inflating artillery prices to turn high profits. The weapons companies denied the allegation. Mr. Vytecka said that Czech weapons companies made only a modest profit; Mr. Jires estimated the net profit at about 3 percent of a sale.
But the Ano party has cited the program’s secrecy as a reason to scrap it. “We don’t know how much we have to pay for it, or even if it’s going straight to Ukraine,” said Mr. Bzoch, who speaks for his party on foreign policy.
The party’s move to dump the program has softened since Ano’s leader, Andrej Babis, called it “rotten” in July. Mr. Bzoch suggested the program could be placed under the control of NATO headquarters in Brussels to ensure it was properly run.
Critics of that plan say that doing so could have a chilling effect if sellers feared that NATO might identify them, setting off Russia’s anger. “The sensitivity of the way we are doing this, the mechanism that keeps the country not seen — that’s the whole point of it,” Mr. Vytecka said.
Additionally, NATO member states would have to agree unanimously to acquire matériel outside the alliance, said Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general. In practice, the model of the Czech Republic’s serving as the lead nation “is probably more agile and efficient,” said Mr. Grand, who is now head of the Aerospace and Defense Industries Association in Europe.
Without a system like the Czech program, it is unclear how Ukraine would meet its ammunition needs. While Europe is increasing ammunition production — Mr. Rutte has said that European manufacturers are expected to produce two million rounds of artillery in 2025 — not all of it will go to Kyiv. Even if it did, it would last only a little over four months; Ukraine fires about 15,000 rounds every day, according to estimates reported in July, the most recent available.
Experts said that Mr. Babis had succeeded in linking the program to Czechs’ growing weariness with the Ukraine war and to concerns about high domestic prices for food and other goods. A Russian-influenced disinformation campaign may be at play, too, officials and experts said, seeding anti-Ukraine sentiment on social media and through emailed chain letters.
Vit Dostal, a political analyst at the Association for International Affairs, a research group in Prague, said that Mr. Babis’s platform was, “basically, that we pay way too much for the support of Ukraine, and others should do the job.” Such criticism “is actually not true,” he added. “But it resonates because this is a very difficult time with the economic situation.”
However, he also said that Russia’s incursions into NATO countries — with drones and fighter jets flying into neighboring Poland as well as into Romania and Estonia over the past two weeks — could change the Czech election dynamics if unnerved voters turned back to the mainstream government.
“It signals some kind of an urgency of what is going on in Ukraine, that the war is close,” Mr. Dostal said.
Lara Jakes, a Times reporter based in Rome, reports on conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years.
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