Kyiv’s mostly-European allies are nowhere near filling the money gap left by the United States’ decision to quit helping Ukraine defend itself against Russia and befriend the Kremlin, new research by a leading German research group found.
Collective new aid allocations to Ukraine’s war effort in 2025 by non-US NATO members states with important contributions from Australia, Canada and Japan are on track to drop to their lowest levels since Russia invaded Ukraine the war in 2022, a statement made public by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (Kiel Institut für Weltwirtschaft, short: IfW Kiel) found.
A leading German research center and think tank, the Kiel Institute is closely affiliated with Kiel University but is organizationally independent. Analysts in and outside Ukraine generally consider The Institute’s meticulously-researched Ukraine Support Tracker be the gold standard information platform recording foreign assistance promised and delivered to Ukraine since Jan. 2022.
According to the Kiel Institute’s most recent findings compiling data through end of Oct. 2025, since the US ended military and financial support to Ukraine in Feb. 2025, Europe has allocated only about €4.2 billion ($4.92 billion) in new Ukraine assistance – a cash flow not nearly compensating for the support yanked away by the Americans.
Probably even grimmer for Ukraine’s future, non-US assistance to Ukraine following a White House policy shift towards supporting the Kremlin against Europe appears to be plummeting, having fallen from a wartime three-month peak €20 billion ($23.44) from April through June 2025 to €11.5 billion ($13.48 billion) for July through September 2025, new Kiel Institute data showed.
Professor Christoph Trebesch, head of the Ukraine Support Tracker project, said:
“Europe has not been able to sustain the momentum of the first half of 2025. The recent slowdown makes it difficult for Europe to fully offset the absence of US military aid in 2025. If this slower pace continues in the remaining months, 2025 will become the year with the lowest level of new aid allocations ever for Ukraine since the outbreak of the full-scale invasion in 2022.”
Institute research found that disparities of support to Ukraine, as it falls, are widening within Europe, with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom having recently increased allocations substantially but still remaining well below contribution levels by Nordic countries in relative terms.
Denmark, Estonia and Lithuania, in that order, are the per capita most committed donors to Ukrainian defense efforts, with those countries sending between 2.8 and 3.3 of their national GDP to Ukraine as assistance. The standout big economy European states with the resources to contribute substantially to Ukraine, but that absolutely are not, are Spain (0.62 percent of GDP) and Italy (0.74 percent of GDP), researchers found.
“The higher allocations from France, Germany, and the UK are significant. But even these three still trail the Nordic countries in relative terms. Meanwhile, the decline of support from Spain and Italy is a notable setback, reinforcing the importance of more balanced burden-sharing across Europe,” said Taro Nishikawa, Ukraine Support Tracker, in a statement.
For Europe and its allies to fill the Ukraine support gap vacated by America reneging on a commitment famously described by US former President Joe Biden to help Kyiv defend itself from Russia “as long as it takes,” countries still supporting Ukraine needed to increase burden placed on taxpayers from about 0.1 percent of national GDP, on average, to about 0.21 percent of national GDP, a March policy paper by the Institute found.
On bilateral levels, to replace lost American support, EU institutions would have to increase annual support to Ukraine from €6 billion ($7.04) to €9 billion ($10.56 billion), Great Britain from €5 ($5.86) to €6.5 ($7.62) billion, France from €1.5 billion ($1.76) to €6 billion ($7.04), Italy from €800 million ($938 million) to €4.5 billion ($5.28 billion), Spain from just €500 million ($586 million) to €3 billion ($3.52 billion) and all remaining European donors would need to move from €14 billion ($16.42 billion) to €16.5 billion ($19.34 billion) that research found.
In rough numbers, an increase in Ukrainian support of that scale would probably increase the average annual burden placed on an individual Italian taxpayer by the equivalent of $105-106 a year, and on the average British taxpayer by $50-51 a year, Kyiv Post calculated.
Besides raw cash shortages, the Kiel Institute policy paper found, the US effective embrace of the Kremlin’s bid to take over about one-fifth of Ukraine using military force has cut Ukraine off from direct access to high-tech, made-in-the-USA weaponry the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) has used in the past to inflict massive casualties on the Russian military, particularly the HIMARS/M270 guided artillery rocket system and the Patriot heavy air defense system. Europe’s arms industry is unable to manufacture replacements for those systems at scale.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday during his daily national war developments statement said his government expects “between $15 and16 billion” via the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL), a NATO-US deal allowing Ukraine to receive US weaponry provided NATO states pay for it first, in full, at a 10 percent mark-up.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in comments to German media during a meeting with German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul in Berlin said that “I count... on more Allies to contribute to PURL, and to step up support to Ukraine in many other ways. It has delivered 75% of the Patriot missiles and 90% of other air defense missiles to Ukraine this year.”
The PURL program will have delivered to Ukraine $5 billion worth of US weaponry by the end of 2025, and the Zelensky-suggested figure of $15 to 16 billion is “projected,” Rutte said, calling on Ukraine-supporting states “to keep up the momentum.”
For those deliveries to take place at the scale in 2026 as projected by Zelensky and Rutte, Ukraine’s allies either would have to increase future support to Ukraine well beyond current levels, or Kyiv would need to reduce domestic expenditures currently partially- or wholly-financed by allied donations, Kyiv Post research found.
According to recent Ukrainian government figures, Ukraine’s total domestic national budget is roughly equivalent to $95.5 billion (domestic revenues are $50 to 57 billion), and the deficit of around $38.8 billion or 42 percent of state spending, is filled by allied donations or loans.
In past budget crunches the Zelensky government has shorted social support programs like pensions, education and public health in favor of defense spending. Within the military sector a critical weak point in Ukrainian fiscal planning has been paying salaries on time and in full to a military of around one million men and women.