Germany says it has given Ukraine 100 billion euros in bilateral aid. A new Kiel Policy Brief finds that only about 41.7 billion euros of that sum fits the description.
The brief comes from the team behind the Ukraine Support Tracker at the Kiel Institute: Nathanael Frey, Ettore Goffi, Federico Mellace, Taro Nishikawa and Christoph Trebesch. They went through the German government’s headline figure and broke it apart. Of the 100 billion euros, 35.9 billion was spent inside Germany, largely on Ukrainian refugees. Another 22.0 billion represents future commitments for military aid, not money already delivered.
The team also updated the tracker’s dataset, which now includes aid announced through August 2026.
How the tracker counts
The Ukraine Support Tracker lists military, financial and humanitarian support 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 count as a separate donor.
Only government-to-government transfers are included. Private donations, and aid from companies, churches and non-governmental organisations, are left out. So is support from international organisations such as the Red Cross, the United Nations or the IMF, because the team says comparable and reliable data is lacking. Flows into other countries, Moldova for example, are not counted.
Putting a price on in-kind aid is the hard part. Where a government reports the value of its donation in its own currency, the tracker uses that figure. Where it lists only items, such as particular weapons or tons of foodstuff, the team looks up market prices and picks the upper bound when it can, using the price of a new item even if the equipment sent was probably used.
The Kiel team says the project exists because much of the debate over aid since the war began has been anecdotal. Its aim is to measure what each Western government has sent, in millions of euros, in a way that allows comparison between donors. The weapons table carries a caveat: it covers only allocations where the number of weapons is public, so the quantities shown are a lower bound.
The researchers invite corrections and feedback on the database at [email protected].
