VoxEU Column Politics and economics

New analysis from Economists for Ukraine: The cost of US aid to Ukraine is less than half the official figures

6 Mar 2025

The US has been the largest country-to-country contributor of aid to Ukraine since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. However, the exact amount of aid provided has become the subject of debate, as generally available data tend to bundle together grants, loans, equipment, investments, and other forms of assistance as if it were all on-budget cash funding. This column tracks each weapon system provided to Ukraine, its vintage, and depreciation to come up with the first quantitative economic estimate of the value of US non-debt direct support to Ukraine.

Anastassia Fedyk

Assistant Professor of Finance, Haas School of Business University of California, Berkeley

James Hodson

Chief Executive Officer AI for Good Foundation

Since Russia’s unilateral annexation of Crimea and undeclared war in Ukraine’s east in 2014, the US has been instrumental in providing Ukraine with training, equipment, and the institutional support needed to survive and develop as a democratic European nation. Since 2022, due to Russia’s brutal and internationally condemned full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the US stepped up its support, which has been critical to the functioning of government, the survival of civil society, and the ability of Ukraine’s military to hold back a much larger enemy. However, the amount of aid provided in value terms is significantly lower than the numbers generally reported (Masters and Merrow 2024, Trebesch et al. 2025).

In a new paper (Fedyk et al. 2025), my co-authors and I assess the economic value of the military aid provided by the US to Ukraine. Instead of more than $60 billion in military assistance (US State Department 2025), the real value amounts to about $18.3 billion. This discrepancy stems from inflated valuations of older weapons stockpiles and other contributing factors.

Our group of 19 research assistants reviewed thousands of procurement contracts to track each weapon system provided by the US to Ukraine, consider the vintage of these weapons, assess their depreciation and failure rates, and assign a depreciated value to the old stock actually provided to Ukraine, rather than the replacement value in new weapons obtained by the US. We also examined the terms of the aid provided, including loans versus grants and support for other countries (e.g. Poland) under the ‘Ukraine aid’ umbrella, to identify specifically grants made by the US to Ukraine.

We also examine direct budget support (non-military aid) from the US to Ukraine, stripping out repayable loans, including specifically grants made by the US to Ukraine, and accounting for US funds that were used to collateralise loans. We also note the extensive terms and conditionality of this aid, which meant that the aid was among the most transparent and audited expenditures, and the Government of Ukraine was never in a position to misappropriate any of the funds.

Our analysis concludes that in three years of full-scale war, the total monetary value of US aid delivered to Ukraine’s government amounts to $50.9 billion, of which $18.3 billion comprises military aid, with the remaining $32.6 billion direct budget support in the form of expense reimbursement through the World Bank and collateral for loans. These figures differ from the appropriation amounts by a factor of two to three (see Figure 1)

Figure 1 Breakdown of different categories of US aid provided to Ukraine into military (in blue) and direct budget support (in green), with verified values shaded in dark colouring and excess reported amounts in light colouring

We break down US support into eight categories: (1) direct funding via international institutional accounts (e.g. World Bank); (2) loans; (3) collateral for the issuance of loans to the Government of Ukraine; (4) Treasury Account Grants for US defence procurement; (5) direct equipment transfer under Presidential Drawdown Authority; (6) indirect equipment transfer by purchasing replacement equipment for an ally; (7) so-called ‘lend-lease’ agreements (enacted but never used); and (8) Foreign Military Financing (FMF) accounts, which allowed strategic loans to Ukraine to purchase US defence supplies.

Direct funding (1) consists of the $31 billion that the US provided through World Bank accounts managed by USAID contractors Deloitte and KPMG. A portion of those funds paid for the administration of funds and program audits, as well as overheads of the World Bank. These accounts work as a reimbursement for verified expenses including pensions and teachers’ and healthcare workers’ salaries. Since Ukraine’s eGovernment system (Diia) is considered among the most advanced in the world (Motkin 2023), the Ukrainian government has effective documentation down to every individual disbursement into people’s bank accounts.

Loans (2) are repayable instruments that should not be counted towards non-recouped ‘aid’. For example, the Export Import Bank of the United States made a loan to Ukraine worth $156 million for the purchase of 40 diesel Wabtec locomotives, which supported 800 new jobs in Western Pennsylvania. This loan is repayable in full.

Collateral (3) for loans should be valued as the value of the collateral that is at risk, rather than the loan amount. The US used $1.6 billion and frozen Russian assets to collateralise approximately $25 billion in loans for the recovery of Ukraine and Moldova. The loans were organised primarily through the World Bank in coordination with other stakeholders and are standard repayable debt instruments.

Treasury Accounts Grants (4) capture $12.1 billion in procurement budget for US weapons systems, munitions, maintenance, and services needed by the Ukrainian military. Not all of the items procured have been delivered to Ukraine yet, and it is unclear how much of the $12.1 billion has been utilised. This spending is a subsidy payment to the US defence industry, from which Ukraine derives a benefit in new equipment and services. Ukraine pays a market price for these weapons despite numerous restrictions. Due to these restrictions, delivery schedules, and the limited selection of items that Ukraine is allowed to procure, the researchers estimate the actual value of (4) as closer to $5.5 billion.

Direct equipment transfers (5) were provided under the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which has been used 55 times in the last three years to send a total of approximately $31 billion of equipment and munitions drawn from existing US stockpiles. However, the $31 billion figure is based on Department of Defense accounting and replacement values, rather than the actual value of the weapons being sent. In Fedyk et al. (2025), we conduct a deep analysis of every weapons system sent to Ukraine, its age, the US stockpile status, and imputed battlefield failure rates, which gives a different picture of the upper limit on the value of these systems to Ukraine: $12.5 billion. For example, Figure 2 illustrates the calculation for Stryker armoured personnel carriers – the depreciated value for carriers produced in 2011 or 2012 is much lower than that of the carriers produced in 2023.

Figure 2 Stryker armoured personnel carriers delivered by the US to Ukraine by production year

Note: Carriers that were produced more than a decade ago are less valuable than those produced in the last few years.

It should also be noted that the vast majority of the equipment provided to Ukraine is no longer used by the US military and therefore had an effective value of zero to the US, other than as potential military support to allies or as a liability due to stringent requirements for recycling of weapons systems and munitions. The estimate of $12.5 billion is a conservative upper bound, without fully writing off such systems.

Indirect equipment transfers (6) consist of approximately $20 billion of strategic investment into Poland’s defence industry, but only $340 million of that specifically accounts for capabilities that Poland gave to Ukraine. Poland is a NATO member, so investment in its defence sector is not aid for Ukraine.

The lend-lease (7) programme expired unused.

Foreign military assistance loans (8) comprise approximately $9.2 billion in loans allocated by the US for Ukraine and 17 other countries affected by the Russian war to procure American-made military supplies, services, and equipment.

Summing these together, we estimate that the true value of military aid provided by the US to Ukraine totals $18.3 billion, and the direct budgetary support totals $32.6 billion (in the form of reimbursement of expenses or collateral for loans), although this portion also includes overheads by intermediaries, and the true value is likely lower.

The total comes out to $50.9 billion, or less than $17 billion per year. This is a negligible part of the US budget (0.25% of the federal budget; see Congressional Budget Office 2024). For comparison, it is roughly the cost of maintenance and energy for federal buildings.

In addition, we note that Ukraine has been subject to extensive audits as an aid recipient (US Congress 2023), and there has been no evidence of issues or anomalies unearthed through those mechanisms. Furthermore, budgetary support from the US to Ukraine has often come with conditionality such as Ukraine implementing specific reforms (Yellen 2024).

Overall, despite the US being the largest country-to-country provider of aid to Ukraine, the value provided is significantly smaller than frequently cited numbers, and small in relative terms compared to the US economy. The US has provided less aid overall than Europe (EU numbers based on Administration Team of the EU Delegation to the United States 2025, plus UK numbers based on UK Government 2025), and a comparable amount of military aid. Since the economies of Europe and the United States are comparable in size, the allies across the Atlantic have shown similar levels of engagement and support.