Germany says it has given Ukraine 100 billion euros. The Kiel Institute says the real figure is less than half that.
A new Kiel Policy Brief from the institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker team went through the sum the German federal government reports as “bilateral aid to Ukraine” and split it into parts. Only about 41.7 billion euros, the team found, counts as actual bilateral aid to Ukraine.
Where did the rest go? Some 35.9 billion euros were spent inside Germany, largely on Ukrainian refugees. Another 22.0 billion euros are future commitments for military aid, money pledged but not yet delivered.
A tracker built to replace anecdote
The Ukraine Support Tracker logs military, financial and humanitarian aid that governments have pledged to Ukraine since January 24, 2022. It covers 41 countries: the EU member states, the other G7 members, and Australia, South Korea, Turkiye, Norway, New Zealand, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, India and Iceland. EU institutions are listed as a separate donor. The latest update adds aid announced through August 2026.
The authors of the database are Nathanael Frey, Ettore Goffi, Federico Mellace, Taro Nishikawa and Christoph Trebesch. They say their aim is to put a number on the scale of aid and make it comparable across donors, because much of the debate since the war began has been anecdotal and lacked rigorous quantification. Figures are given in millions of euros and count both financial and in-kind transfers. The team draws on official government sources, existing lists of Ukraine aid and reports from established news media.
Valuing goods is the hard part. Some governments report what their donated equipment is worth in their own currency, and the tracker uses that number. Others name only the items, such as particular weapons or “tons of foodstuff.” For those, the team looks up market prices and picks the upper bound where it can, which often means the price of buying new even when the equipment sent was probably used.
What the tracker leaves out
The database covers only transfers from one government to another. Money going to other countries, Moldova among them, is excluded. So are donations from private individuals, companies, churches and non-governmental organizations. Aid from international organizations such as the Red Cross, the United Nations and the IMF is not part of the main database either, mostly because of a lack of systematic data and reporting.
The weapons table has its own caveat. It lists only allocations where the number of weapons has been made public, so the quantities shown are a lower bound.
The team asks for feedback at [email protected] or through an online form, and says it is “continuously expanding, correcting, and improving” the project.
Sources
- Ukraine Support Tracker – A Database of Military, Financial and Humanitarian Aid to Ukraine
- List of military aid to Ukraine during the Russo-Ukrainian war
