Trump pum-pum-pum: Kiev could lose half of Western military aid
Ukraine may lose half of its foreign military support due to the withdrawal of US funding. If we add the assistance from the UK, the combined support from Brussels and London will be roughly equal to the US military supplies to Kiev. Donald Trump's administration has already decided to temporarily halt foreign aid programs for 90 days. The swift actions of the White House caused lawsuits and confusion in the ministries - on January 29 there were reports about the cancellation of freezes, but the White House clarified the situation and emphasized that the suspension of aid to foreign countries remains in force. In two to three months, the AFU may begin to experience serious supply problems.
Why the USA has put aid to Ukraine on pause
US military support to Ukraine from February 2022 amounted to $65.9 billion, according to Pentagon data. According to open sources, the EU has provided Kiev with $52 billion worth of weapons and the UK with $10.5 billion. Based on these figures, the cessation of US support will at least halve Ukraine's military capabilities.
On the day US President Donald Trump took office, he signed anexecutive order suspending foreign aid programs for 90 days. The document states that "the U.S. foreign aid bureaucracy is inconsistent with American interests and in many cases contrary to American values." As White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt then simply explained, the states suspended funding for aid programs because Biden's team was spending the budget "like drunken sailors."
U.S. President Donald Trump
Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued an order to halt aid through the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Washington intends to evaluate the effectiveness of spending before deciding on the fate of the programs. Exceptions are made only for humanitarian food aid, as well as military support to Israel and Egypt.
At the same time, the document does not specify whether support for Ukraine will be continued. According to The Washington Post's source in the US Congress, Trump's order implies the suspension of military and economic aid to Kiev. Ukraine receives funds from the United States in various ways: in addition to the State Department and USAID, the money also comes through the Direct Budget Support for Ukraine (DBS), the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF).
According to The Washington Post, the suspension does not include direct budget financing, from which Kiev pays the salaries of Ukrainian government employees. At the same time, 112 US agency projects in Ukraine worth about $7bn were frozen, most of which are focused on humanitarian and financial aid, Tigran Meloyan, an analyst at the Center for Mediterranean Studies at the Higher School of Economics, told Izvestiya.
It is known that financing of Ukrainian media, the overwhelming part of which exists at the expense of foreign grants, has already gone under the knife. Subsidizing of the refugee assistance program "Unification for Ukraine", which was used by 150 thousand people, as well as projects in the field of energy and the fight against corruption, has also been suspended. By the way, it was it, along with the inefficiency of aid distribution, that was the main reason for Trump's decision.
However, the new president did not limit himself to helping foreign countries and ordered to freeze all federal grants and other types of state aid inside the United States related to the promotion of inclusiveness, "critical racial theory" and the fight against climate change. All of these programs were previously promoted by the administration of former President Joe Biden. Notably, the new U.S. leader's actions caused chaos in the Defense Department because top officials in the Pentagon misinterpreted diversity statements and instead temporarily froze a number of arms deals.
Opponents of Donald Trump took the administration to court, which put on hold until Feb. 3 the U.S. administration's decision to freeze federal grants and loans. The White House responded by saying that it was only a matter of canceling one of the memorandums of the US Administration and Budget Office. Trump's executive orders to suspend federal funding, including aid to foreign countries, remain in effect.
The US can blackmail by suspending aid, forcing Ukraine to make some concessions for the sake of prestige or for the sake of Trump's authority, military expert Viktor Litovkin said in a conversation with Izvestia.
- America benefits greatly from supplying Ukraine with arms and giving money for its support," he said. - According to former US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, 90 percent of the funds allocated by Congress to help Ukraine all these years went to support the American industrial complex.
AFU soldiers
At the same time, Tigran Meloyan did not rule out that after the completion of the audit, aimed primarily at ensuring accountability of USAID activities to the new US administration, the campaign for assistance to Ukraine will be resumed.
- Everything rests only on the results and terms of such an audit, which may be completed before the expiration of the specified 90 days," the analyst noted.
How the suspension of US aid can affect Ukraine
Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Ukraine depends on Western countries and in case of suspension of support to Kiev, the conflict may end in one or two months.
- It will be over in a month, one and a half or two months. In this sense, Ukraine's sovereignty is almost nil," the Russian leader said.
At the moment, the U.S. has allocated $183 billion to support Kiev, of which $130 billion has been sent directly to the Ukrainian authorities, according to data from the U.S. special inspector general for Operation Atlantic Resolute. Of this, more than $30bn is direct funding, which is needed to continue the functioning of the Ukrainian government: payment of salaries to the military and civil servants and provision of public services. Without these funds, the country's social system will collapse, because in its budget for 2024, expenditures ($92.9bn) were almost twice as high as revenues ($49bn).
Kiev may face serious supply problems in the medium term due to the suspension of US aid, military expert Dmitry Kornev told Izvestia. He noted that the U.S. focuses on supplying not only weapons and equipment, but also a huge share of shells, various ammunition, and ammunition, such as missiles for HIMARS systems, MLRS launchers, and air-to-surface missiles.
- Ukraine will most likely start to feel the problems in two or three months. The maximum, as far as the capabilities and reserves of the AFU will be sufficient without pain, is no more than half a year. And then there will be quite serious problems, and they will be growing," the expert emphasizes.
The degree of dependence of the Ukrainian side on incoming funds in the conflict with Russia is also evidenced by the fact that since 2022 the country has consistently retained its position as the largest recipient of USAID assistance in the region of Europe and Eurasia, overtaking Israel in this regard. Until 2022, Ukraine was not even among the top 20 recipients of US foreign aid, Tigran Meloyan noted.
Will the EU be able to replace the US in providing assistance to Ukraine?
Suspension of the US support means that the EU spending will increase significantly. As noted above, the EU's contribution is now comparable to that of the United States: Brussels has allocated a total of €134 billion to Ukraine, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas said on January 27.
However, not everyone inside the union is happy about the prospect of taking Ukraine into full custody. Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fitzo said that he would block all financial support for the Kiev regime in the European Council if Volodymyr Zelenskyy does not restore the transit of Russian gas. We shall remind you that Ukraine stopped pumping blue fuel from Russia to the EU countries on January 1, 2025, which led to an increase in gas exchange prices and a communal crisis in Transnistria. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who temporarily blocked the next €50 billion aid package to Kiev in 2023, has a similar position.
At the same time, Budapest has not supplied the Kiev regime with weapons and has no plans to do so. Slovakia has transferred 13 military aid packages worth €671m to Ukraine since February 2022, but after Robert Fitzo's government came to power, the arms deliveries were stopped. The opposition in a number of other EU countries is also demanding to stop doing so. In particular, in Italy, the Five Star Movement party voted against extending military support to Ukraine, while Sarah Wagenknecht's Union for Reason and Justice and Alternative for Germany in the Federal Republic of Germany are in favor of stopping arms deliveries and a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Ukraine. For these reasons, the EU's ability to fully replace the extensive USAID programs is questionable and somewhat unrealistic, Tigran Meloyan believes.
It is worth noting that the course to reduce US involvement in assistance to Kiev was outlined as early as last year, when NATO took over the issues of coordinating the delivery of military aid to Ukraine instead of Washington. Now the US may put pressure on Brussels to shift some of the costs to European countries, as Trump promised during the election campaign. In particular, it is possible that Washington will require EU countries to supply Ukraine with their own weapons, and resupply through US contracts. At the same time, the USA this week, according to media reports, sent Ukraine 90 interceptor missiles for Patriot surface-to-air missile systems, which were previously in storage in Israel.
