For the first three years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the United States was Ukraine’s dominant bilateral backer. In 2025, new US support all but stopped. Leading Germany economic research organization the Kiel Institute recently released a policy brief that traces which donors have stepped in and how far official German figures have overstated what Berlin has actually sent to Ukraine.
The report, “How much aid has Germany given to Ukraine?” by Federico Mellace, Taro Nishikawa, Christoph Trebesch, Nathanael Frey, and Ettore Goffi, draws on the institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker. The Tracker counts only aid that can be dated, valued, and traced to a public source.
By that measure, the US allocated €115.4 billion ($128.4 million) in bilateral aid from early 2022 through August 2026, more than three times Germany’s €30.8 billion ($34.29 million). Germany ranked second in absolute terms and first in Europe, ahead of the United Kingdom at €22.8 billion, Canada at €14.9 billion, and Japan at €14.4 billion. Military aid made up €25.0 billion of the German total, or about four fifths.
The trajectories diverged sharply after 2024. The authors find that new US aid has dropped 99% since that year. They compare each donor’s average annual allocations for 2022 through 2024 with those from January 2025 through August 2026. German allocations rose from €5.3 billion to €8.9 billion a year, the highest of any donor in the second period by a wide margin. German allocations fell to €4.4 billion in 2024, then more than doubled to €9.4 billion in 2025. Military aid drove the increase, climbing from roughly €4 billion to €9 billion. The first eight months of 2026 already exceeded the full 2024 total.
Size relative to the economy told a different story. Germany’s bilateral aid equaled 0.86% of its 2021 GDP, which placed it 12th among donors, close to the EU average. Denmark led at 3.49% of GDP, followed by Estonia at 3.07% and Norway at 2.83%. Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden together gave more than Germany, though their combined population was a third of Germany’s.
Germany has also contributed indirectly through the EU, which allocated more than €100 billion to Ukraine, most of it as loans. The Kiel team attributed €22.7 billion of that to Germany based on its share of the EU budget. That raised Germany’s total to €53.5 billion, or 1.49% of GDP, and moved it to 10th relative to economic size, ahead of Canada and the United Kingdom. Even so, its combined total still came to less than half of what Washington provided, most of it before 2025.
The report devotes much of its length to a figure circulating widely in German politics: €100 billion in aid. The government’s August 2026 overview reported €43.3 billion in civilian support and €57.6 billion in military support. The authors reconstructed that total from thousands of pages of federal budget documents and found that only about 40% went to Ukraine.
Some €35.9 billion was spent inside Germany, including €27.45 billion in Bürgergeld minimum-income benefits for Ukrainian refugees. Another €22 billion consisted of military commitments for 2027 and later that might never be paid out. Counting only aid directed to Ukraine, the government’s own figures produced a bilateral total of €41.7 billion.
The authors also set the aid against domestic spending over the same five years. Federal transfers to the pension system totaled €599.3 billion, more than 14 times the upper estimate of Ukraine aid. German defense spending unrelated to Ukraine reached €373.1 billion, about 11 times the €34.2 billion in military aid paid or budgeted through 2026.
The authors attribute much of the confusion to Berlin’s own reporting. Germany published little at the start of the war, shifted to detailed reporting in 2023 and 2024, then pulled back. It stopped updating its list of delivered weapons after April 2025. Its current overviews merged aid already delivered with future commitments and no longer separated spending in Ukraine from spending at home.
Only 22% of German aid items in the Tracker carry a monetary value from the source, compared with a 70% average across donors and 97% for Sweden, Denmark, and Australia. The Defense Ministry was the only ministry in the government overview whose section carried no figure at all, leaving the €57.6 billion military total unexplained.
The report recommends five changes: separating aid to Ukraine from domestic spending, publishing a consistent valuation method for equipment taken from Bundeswehr stocks, breaking down the military figure, reporting delivered and future aid separately, dating each package
The authors point to Sweden and Denmark, which have announced dated and valued military packages. They also cite Canada and the United Kingdom, which have reported military, humanitarian, and financial support on separate official pages. Their verdict on Berlin is measured. Germany’s aid, they write, is “sizable but not exceptional,” though since 2025 it has provided the largest amount of new bilateral allocations of any donor.
