‘Playing with fire’: Ukraine’s frustration grows with US lawmakers,

Athens, Greece – Frustration with the United States for holding back critical financial and military aid from Ukraine spilled into the open at the Delphi Economic Forum in Greece last week.

“The Russians are destroying Ukrainian power plants, which is a war crime, but unfortunately they’re getting away with it because as the collective West we have not supplied Ukraine with enough missiles,” Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish former foreign and defence minister, told Al Jazeera on the sidelines of the meeting. On the day he spoke to Al Jazeera, Russia unleashed a barrage of some 80 missiles that completely destroyed a thermal power plant in Kyiv, which supposedly has the best air defences in the country.

It was only the second time in the war that an entire electricity plant had been destroyed. Russia destroyed a plant in Kharkiv on March 24.

“You can’t run modern cities without electricity. So I’m afraid that by not giving Ukrainians enough anti-aircraft or anti-missile effectors in time, we may be getting another wave of refugees who can’t stay in their own cities,” said Sikorski.

Poland is already home to almost a million Ukrainian refugees out of a total of six million in Europe. Meanwhile, Republicans loyal to presidential hopeful Donald Trump in the US House of Representatives have been afraid to defy him by voting for a $60.1bn package of aid stuck since December – despite the fact that Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have approved the bill. One commentator said he was “optimistic” it would now pass.

“We are beyond primary season, in which members of Congress that might vote on hot button issues the wrong way for parts of their constituency get primaried by people, particularly from the right,” said Charles Ries, a senior fellow at the RAND Corporation, a US think tank.

“I’ve been hearing this ‘by next week’ or ‘by next month’ for about eight months so I’ll believe it when it happens,” said Sikorski. There was also frustration that Europe’s defence industry had been slow to ramp up munitions production and fill the gap left by the US. “They are not producing enough even for themselves,” Ukrainian MP Yulia Klymenko told Al Jazeera. “For two years they have talked about how maybe tomorrow or by the end of 2025 they will start production. It is looking very irresponsible.”

“What the war in Ukraine showed was that … the depletion rate for munitions is much faster than we had planned beforehand, so we need to rearm ourselves as well as Ukraine. We need to beef up our military-industrial capability,” David Lidington, chair of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, told Al Jazeera.

Sikorski estimated that Europe had actually delivered the one million artillery shells it promised Ukraine a year ago, in money or kind.

A separate Czech initiative to buy stockpiled shells from around the world would deliver about another million by June, he said, when a new Russian offensive is expected.

“But compare this to the Russian production of 2-3 million [a year],” he said. “We have many times their resources but they have mobilised their resources better.”