US figures do not support Trump claims on Ukraine spending

President Donald Trump on Wednesday repeated a claim that the United States has spent $350 billion on Ukraine’s war — a figure that far eclipses the amount recorded by the Department of Defense and the interagency oversight group that tracks U.S. appropriations to Ukraine.

Since Russia’s illegal invasion in February 2022, the U.S. Congress has appropriated about $183 billion for Ukraine, according to the interagency oversight group that is charged with presenting reports to Congress.

Of that, the Pentagon confirmed to VOA that the U.S. has sent $65.9 billion in military aid to Ukraine, and an additional $3.9 billion that Congress has authorized in military aid to Kyiv remains unspent.

About $58 billion of the $183 billion in total aid for Ukraine was spent in the U.S., going directly toward boosting the U.S. defense industry, either by replacing old U.S. weapons given to Kyiv with new American-made weapons, by procuring new U.S.-made weapons for Kyiv or by making direct industrial investments.

VOA asked the White House to clarify Trump’s comments, specifically seeking any documentation for the mathematical discrepancy. The White House replied by referring VOA back to the president’s comments.

In a post Wednesday on his social media site Truth Social, Trump said, “Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending $350 Billion Dollars, to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and ‘TRUMP,’ will never be able to settle.”

Zelenskyy on Wednesday told Ukrainian reporters the total cost of the war since February 2022 was about $320 billion.

“One hundred and twenty billion of that comes from us, the people of Ukraine, the taxpayers, and $200 billion from the United States and the European Union,” Zelensky said. “This is the cost of weapons. This is the weapons package — $320 billion.”

Trump, who has mentioned the $350 billion figure several times, also said in his Wednesday social media post: “The United States has spent $200 Billion Dollars more than Europe, and Europe’s money is guaranteed, while the United States will get nothing back.”

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a Germany-based nonprofit that tracks military, financial and humanitarian support to Ukraine, says European nations —specifically the EU, United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland — have allocated about $140 billion in total in aid for Ukraine, while the United States has allocated about $120 billion in total aid. Total aid includes military, humanitarian and financial aid to Ukraine.

The U.S. has provided about $2 billion more than Europe in military aid for Ukraine, but “European donors have been the main source of [total] aid to Ukraine since 2022, especially when it comes to financial and humanitarian aid,” the institute said in its latest report last week.

The aid to Ukraine constitutes a very small amount of GDP for several nations. For example, the U.S., Germany and the U.K. have mobilized less than 0.2% of their GDP per year to support Kyiv, while contributions from France, Italy and Spain to Ukraine have amounted to about 0.1% of their annual GDP. 

U.S. government math is complex, and spending is massive in scale. A live tracker of U.S. government spending says that the U.S. government has spent about $2.4 trillion in the early part of the 2025 fiscal year. The previous year’s spending was $6.75 trillion. 

Still, scholars were quick to dismiss the accuracy of Trump’s numbers.

“This figure is not true,” said Liana Fix, fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s possible to track how much the United States has spent for Ukraine.” 
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