US President Donald Trump said European aid to Ukraine is largely in the form of loans, while the US had given money without expecting it to be repaid.
Speaking on February 27, Mr Trump said: “Much of the European aid to Ukraine has been sent in the form of loans for which they expect to be paid back and we didn’t have that honour under the Biden administration. He sent money after money after money and never had any knowledge of ever seeing it back.”
Evaluation
Mr Trump is correct to say that much European aid to Ukraine, around a third of overall support, is in the form of loans, but that is also the case for a chunk of US aid.
But the hope is that loans can be paid back from seized Russian assets, and the European countries are subsidising the interest rate payments.
The facts
The Kiel Institute think tank tracks global aid to Ukraine in its Ukraine Support Tracker data.
The Kiel Institute distinguishes aid between financial, humanitarian and military aid and support for Ukrainian refugees.
Financial aid
At the time of writing, the latest version of the dataset showed that total US financial aid allocations to Ukraine between January 24 2022 and December 31 2024 were 46.6 billion euros (see sheet “Fig 10 Financial Aid by Type”).
Out of this, 28.26 billion euros was in the form of grants while 18.34 billion euros were loans. This means that around 39.4% of the US financial aid allocations were loans.
EU institutions have meanwhile supplied 46.38 billion euros of financial aid, of which 41.64 billion euros, or 89.8%, were in the form of loans.
Those figures do not, however, account for all European financial aid spending, as many European countries have made their own allocations to Ukraine.
Taken together all European countries, including non-EU members such as the UK, have allocated a further 10.68 billion euros to Ukraine.
Military, humanitarian and refugee aid
Financial aid is not the only aid from European countries and the US.
In total, according to the Kiel database (see sheet “Fig 3. Ranking”) the US has allocated 64.13 billion euros of military aid, and Europe has given 61.97 billion euros of military aid.
The US has provided 3.42 billion euros of humanitarian aid, while Europe has provided 13.24 billion euros in humanitarian aid.
That means that European assistance adds up to 132.26 billion euros (all figures rounded to two decimal places). Of this 113.13 billion euros is from the EU or its member states.
The data also shows (see sheet “Fig 6 With Refugee Support”) a further 19.58 billion euros spent by EU member states on supporting Ukrainian refugees, taking the EU and its members’ total to 132.71 billion euros.
The Kiel data does not split the military, refugee or humanitarian data into grants and loans, however most is not repayable. If assuming that none of that money is loans then just under 34.5% of all EU and EU members’ money is loans.
This roughly matches the EU’s own figures, which said 65% of it and its members’ support for Ukraine has been provided as grants or in-kind support, while 35% was loans.
The EU says it and its members “have made available close to 145 billion US dollars” (138 billion euros at today’s exchange rate) in financial, military, humanitarian and refugee assistance.
Repayment terms
The loans from the EU are – in the union’s own words “highly concessional” and the interest rate payments are subsidised by the EU. The loans have a long maturity period, meaning that the principal of the loan will not need to start to be repaid until 2033.
In addition to this, the EU has a “loan cooperation mechanism” which is intended to support Ukraine repaying up to 45 billion euros of its loans from the EU and G7 countries which are set to be paid to Ukraine between December 2024 and December 2027.
The support will come from the income generated by the billions of euros in frozen Russian assets which will be used to repay the loans.
This means that although the loans will be repaid at some point, much of the money to repay them will not come from Ukraine. Although the terms of the G7 agreement say that if there is a peace deal where Russia “pays for the damages it has caused”, then Ukraine will repay the parts of the loans which have not been covered by the revenue from frozen Russian assets.
Links
Press conference (archived page and transcript from CNN)
Kiel Institute – Ukraine Support Tracker Data (archived)
Kiel Institute – data (archived)
European Union – EU Assistance to Ukraine (archived)
European Commission – Instrument for providing support to Ukraine for 2023 (archived)
European Commission – EU financial support to Ukraine (archived)
Annex to the G7 Finance Ministers’ Statement (archived)