Berlin calls it 100 billion euros of “bilateral aid to Ukraine.” Researchers at the Kiel Institute say only about 41.7 billion euros of that sum actually fits the description.
The finding comes from a new Kiel Policy Brief by the team behind the Ukraine Support Tracker, who took the German federal government’s headline number apart and sorted it into its parts. Another 35.9 billion euros, they found, was spent inside Germany, largely on Ukrainian refugees. A further 22.0 billion euros is money pledged for military aid in the future, not yet delivered.
The split matters because the 100 billion figure has circulated as a measure of what Germany has handed to Kyiv. The tracker team treats it differently: cash and goods that reached Ukraine count as bilateral aid, while refugee costs at home and promises still on paper do not.
An updated dataset
Alongside the brief, the researchers refreshed the tracker’s database. It now covers aid announced through August 2026. The team behind it is Nathanael Frey, Ettore Goffi, Federico Mellace, Taro Nishikawa and Christoph Trebesch.
The tracker has recorded military, financial and humanitarian support from governments to Ukraine since January 24, 2022. It follows 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 appear as a separate donor.
Its scope is narrow by design. Only transfers from one government to another are counted. Gifts from private individuals, companies, churches and aid groups are left out, as is support from bodies such as the Red Cross, the United Nations and the IMF, since the Kiel team says reliable, comparable data on those flows is lacking. Money sent to other countries, Moldova for example, is not included either.
How in-kind aid is priced
Weapons and supplies are harder to value than cash. Some governments publish what their in-kind donations were worth in their own currency, and the tracker uses that figure as its starting point. Others name only the items, a particular weapon system or several “tons of foodstuff,” and leave the value out.
In those cases the researchers look up market prices from a wide range of sources. Where there is a choice they take the higher number, for instance the price of buying the item new, even though much of the military equipment sent is probably used.
The weapons table carries its own warning. It lists only allocations where the number of weapons has been made public, so the quantities shown are a lower bound.
The team says its aim is a database that makes aid comparable across donor countries, replacing what it describes as largely anecdotal discussion since the war began. It draws on official government sources, existing lists of Ukraine aid and reports from news media, and it invites corrections at [email protected].
