US Presidential candidate Donald Trump at a recent campaign stop said American taxpayer-funded support to Ukraine was close to an eye-watering $300 billion, and that Europe isn’t even close to paying its fair share.
The reality is that Trump’s figure – “revealed’ to prospective voters in Savannah Georgia – was wrong and overstated US support to Ukraine by at least a factor of four, and maybe more, a Kyiv Post fact check found.
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In the same Tuesday stump speech, Trump claimed that Ukraine’s European allies were dodging payment of their fair share of Ukraine assistance, and leaving America to pick up the tab.
In fact, total US military assistance for the duration of more than 30 months of the war in Ukraine is actually less than total European military assistance provided to Ukraine.
Once state-to-state assistance of all types including military, financial and humanitarian aid is considered, Europe’s NATO members and other allies have collectively anted-up $100 for every $68 sent by America since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
American military assistance to Ukraine, its scale, Ukrainian greediness and European fecklessness and free riding are recurring themes at the beginning of Trump’s campaign speeches which often last as long as 90 minutes.
During his Savannah campaign speech, Trump led off with a diatribe that slammed Ukraine, the Zelensky government, the Biden administration and the whole of Europe.
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“Every time Zelensky comes to the United States, he walks away with $100 billion. I think he's the greatest salesman on earth,” Trump said. Earlier in the day, in Pennsylvania, at roughly the same point in his stump speech, Trump threw out $60 billion as the number.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry says, President Volodymyr Zelensky has visited the US four times, in December 2022 and 2023, in September 2023, with the fourth being this Monday. According to open-source investigations, he has never come back with $60 billion in US assistance commitments.
Following the first visit data, compiled by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, US quarterly military support to Ukraine increased from $9.4 billion to $12.7 billion.
The US contribution was $1.4 billion following the September 2023 visit and $0.3 billion following the December 2023 visit.
According to official State Department figures released on Sept. 6, the total value of all US military assistance to Ukraine from 2022 through the present is $58.5 billion, less than one-quarter of the alleged $300 billion “scam” Trump told Georgian voters and taxpayers.
In accusing Europe’s NATO members and their allies of not pulling their weight in Ukraine and leaving the US to pick up the tab, Trump said:
“(You) know what Europe has given them, which is approximately our size. When you add up the countries together, their economy, it's very close to our size. They've given them like a small fraction of that [$300 billion] number. Just a small, very small, fraction and we have an ocean separating [the US from Europe and the War in Ukraine].”
Those Trump claims are also demonstrably false in multiple ways.
If military hardware and pure military assistance is totted up, then total non-US, primarily European, aid up to June 2024 is around $58 billion, compared to the US $55 billion over the same period.
From September 2023 through March 2024, US military assistance to Ukraine plummeted to less than $2 billion because of the funding block imposed by Congress, which many say was at Trump’s instigation. This coincided with Russian offensives that captured the cities of Bakhmut and Avdiivka. The value of military material delivered by European states to Ukraine, during those critical six months was more than twelve times that of the US. Trump, of course, made no mention of Europe stepping in as Ukraine’s arsenal during that period.
If the value of aid is calculated on a per capita basis, Europe’s sacrifice overshadows America’s even more.
States such as Denmark, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia pay as much two percent of their GDP in assistance to Ukraine. The US kicks in a little less then a half of a percent – ahead of pro-Putin Hungary and neutral Switzerland, but behind practically the entirety of NATO and western Europe – including France, Italy, Spain and even Austria.
If aid to Ukraine considers military, financial and humanitarian, then the gap is even wider than Trump claims.
Collectively states other than the US allocated $123 billion since Russia’s 2022 invasion, compared to around $84 billion by the US. If aid money promised but not yet allocated is included, then Europe’s contribution of around $209 billion dwarfs the US $112 data compiled by Statistica.com showed.
Later in his speech, Trump told listeners that Ukrainian resistance to Russia was futile as Russia always wins its wars: “What happens if they [Russia] win? That's what they do. They fight wars. As somebody told me the other day, they beat Hitler, they beat Napoleon. That's what they do. They fight and it's not pleasant.”
The Ukrainian internet was quick to point out that in slightly more than the last century the Russian / Soviet military was repeatedly defeated, by: Japan – 1905, Germany – 1918, Poland – 1919, in Spain – 1936, Finland – 1939, the Baltic States –1939, Afghanistan – 1989 and Chechnya – 1996. Trump made no reference to those facts.
Trump’s office did not immediately respond to a Kyiv Post request for comment.
A full transcript of Trump’s Savannah speech from Yahoo!/Storyful can be enjoyed here.
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