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As President Donald Trump has sought to secure rights to Ukraine’s minerals as compensation for U.S. aid to fight the Russian invasion, he has repeatedly overstated the amount of aid provided by the U.S. compared with Europe and exaggerated the extent to which European assistance – unlike U.S. aid — is in the form of guaranteed loans.
“Europe has given $100 billion. The United States has given $350 billion,” Trump said at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 22. “But here’s worse — Europe gave it in the form of a loan, they get their money back. We gave it in the form of nothing, so I want them to give us something for all of the money we put up.”
Trump made similar claims throughout February — during the swearing in for Tulsi Gabbard as the director of National Intelligence, at a joint press conference with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer and in an Oval Office appearance with French President Emmanuel Macron.
He also made the claim in a heated Feb. 28 meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who had come to the U.S. to sign the minerals deal.
“Europe, as you know, gave much less money, but they had security, it was in the form of a loan. They get their money back and we didn’t,” Trump told Zelenskyy near the start of the roughly 45-minute meeting, which ended acrimoniously.
Zelenskyy left the U.S. without signing the deal, and on March 3, the Trump administration suspended all military aid to Ukraine.
We’ll lay out the facts about how U.S. aid to Ukraine compares with aid supplied by the European Union and European countries.
Amount of Aid
Mark Cancian, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, told us in an email that “Trump’s citation of $350 billion is double what Congress has appropriated.”
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Congress has passed five spending bills to provide support to Ukraine, totaling about $174.2 billion, as we’ve explained before in fact-checking this and other claims Trump has made about Ukraine and Zelenskky. Each of those five measures passed with bipartisan support.
And, according to a report from the special inspector general who is overseeing the U.S. support for Ukraine, a total of $182.75 billion has been made available for the broader response.
Not all of that money has been distributed, though. And, as we’ve written before, a chunk of it used for purchasing weapons and providing military training has stayed in the U.S.
“Notably, military aid funds [about $66 billion] remain in the U.S. and are invested in U.S. military production,” Marianna Fakhurdinova, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, told us in an email. She said that about half of that amount “goes to US companies to replenish weapons sent to Ukraine from existing stocks,” and half goes to companies in the U.S. that manufacture weapons for Ukraine.
Contrary to Trump’s claims, Europe has provided more in aid than the U.S. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research organization that tracks funding for Ukraine, the U.S. has so far allocated about $121 billion compared with about $140 billion from Europe.
The Kiel Institute’s figures are lower than what the U.S. Congress has appropriated because the institute only includes direct, bilateral aid. It also shows figures for what additional amounts have been committed, but not yet allocated. There’s not much more that the U.S. has committed, but Europe has committed another $122 billion.
A February fact sheet from the European Union said the EU and its member states had provided about $145 billion since the start of the war, and then in February, the EU committed up to $54 billion for recovery and reconstruction.
Loans
As for Trump’s claim that Europe provided its aid to Ukraine in the “form of a loan, they get their money back,” that’s an exaggeration. Only a portion of European aid is in the form of loans.
It’s true that most of the bipartisan U.S. spending agreements for Ukraine aid were given in the form of grants, according to the Congressional Research Service, except for the most recent appropriation.
In the 2024 emergency supplemental appropriations bill, about $9 billion of the assistance was provided as loans.
Fakhurdinova pointed out that “the first half of this loan [$4.7 billion] was forgiven by President Biden in November, so President Trump has power over the other half of these funds.”
Also, as we noted above, some of the U.S. military aid never left the U.S., since it was provided to U.S. companies to produce or replenish weapons.
As for the EU, about 35% of the $145 billion it had appropriated from the start of the war through January was provided as “highly concessional loans,” according to the EU fact sheet.
“The ‘highly concessional’ nature of these loans refers to their long maturities and subsidized interest rate costs through the EU budget,” Cancian told us, citing a November paper from the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies. Aid packages from the EU have included, for example, a 10-year grace period and a 35-year repayment period.
It’s also notable that the Vienna Institute’s paper said, “The emerging consensus is that Ukraine’s debt is not likely to be sustainable and, consequently, that significant debt relief will have to be negotiated.”
Separate from any of the other aid provided by the U.S. or Europe, the G7 — which includes the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.K. — agreed in 2024 to provide $50 billion in loans to support Ukraine.
The loans are to be paid back with the profits from frozen Russian assets, according to the Treasury Department, and the U.S. has the same terms as the rest of the G7 countries.
The U.S. portion of the loan is $20 billion, which was disbursed in December.
Trump has a point that a larger percentage of European aid has been in the form of loans, compared with the U.S., but most of the aid from Europe hasn’t been structured as loans.
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