Germany says it has given Ukraine 100 billion euros in bilateral aid. The Kiel Institute says less than half of that actually went to Ukraine.
In a new policy brief, the institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker team took the German government’s figure apart. Only about 41.7 billion euros, it found, can be classed as real bilateral aid to Ukraine. Another 35.9 billion euros was spent inside Germany, largely on Ukrainian refugees. A further 22.0 billion euros represents future commitments for military aid rather than money or equipment already delivered.
The tracker’s dataset has also been updated 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: EU member states, the other members of the G7, and Australia, South Korea, Turkiye, Norway, New Zealand, Switzerland, China, Taiwan, India and Iceland. EU institutions are listed as a separate donor. The team behind it is Nathanael Frey, Ettore Goffi, Federico Mellace, Taro Nishikawa and Christoph Trebesch.
Its scope is narrow on purpose. The tracker follows government-to-government transfers into Ukraine. Private donations are out, as are gifts from companies, churches and non-governmental organizations, and so is support from international bodies such as the Red Cross or the United Nations. The team says there is not enough comparable and reliable data on those. Flows into other countries, Moldova for example, are left out too.
The researchers say the aim is to measure the scale of aid and make it comparable across donors. Much of the discussion since the war began, they write, has been anecdotal, without rigorous numbers behind it. They report support in millions of euros, covering both financial and in-kind transfers, and draw on official government sources, existing lists of Ukraine aid and reports from established news media.
Valuing in-kind aid is the hard part. Where a government reports a value in its own currency, the team uses it as the baseline. Where it only names the items, a number of weapons or “tons of foodstuff”, the researchers look up market prices and choose an upper bound when they can, such as the price of buying new equipment even if much of it was probably used.
The institute also warns that its table of allocations only covers cases where the number of weapons is made public, so the quantities shown should be read as a lower bound.
