Berlin says it has given Ukraine 100 billion euros in “bilateral aid.” A new Kiel Policy Brief says that figure does not hold up, at least not as described.
The brief comes from the team behind the Ukraine Support Tracker: Nathanael Frey, Ettore Goffi, Federico Mellace, Taro Nishikawa and Christoph Trebesch. They went through the number the German federal government reports and broke it down. Only about 41.7 billion euros can be classified 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, not money already delivered.
The tracker’s dataset has been updated alongside the brief and now includes aid announced through August 2026.
What the tracker counts
The Ukraine Support Tracker lists and quantifies military, financial and humanitarian aid pledged to Ukraine since January 24, 2022. It covers 41 countries: the EU member states, the other G7 members, Australia, South Korea, Turkiye, Norway, New Zealand, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, India and Iceland. EU institutions appear as a separate donor.
The database is limited to transfers from one government to another. Private donations are left out, along with support from churches, companies and non-governmental organizations. International organizations such as the IMF, the Red Cross and the United Nations are not systematically covered either, mainly because reporting by most of them is patchy. Flows that go to other countries, Moldova for example, are not counted.
Putting a price on equipment
The hard part is non-financial aid: shipments of weapons, medicines or food. Where a government reports the value of a donation in its own currency, the tracker takes that number as the baseline. Where a government lists only the items, say specific weapons or several “tons of foodstuff,” the team looks up market prices. It picks an upper bound when it can, using the price of buying the item new even if much of the military equipment is probably used.
The tracker’s table of weapons covers only allocations where the number of weapons is made public. Its authors say the quantities shown should be read as a lower bound.
The team says the aim is a facts-based discussion. In its view, much of the debate on aid since the start of the war has been anecdotal, with no rigorous count behind it.
