The decision to pause aid comes after a meeting between Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy descended into a shouting match Friday. Trump and Vance berated Zelenskyy that he hadn’t shown enough gratitude for Washington’s $65.9 billion in military aid to Ukraine since 2022.
That’s far more than any other country (the second highest is Germany’s $13 billion, according to the Kiel Institute think tank.) In fact, the U.S. contributions are so large that they roughly equal all other nations’ aid put together.
Ukraine’s European allies do not see arming Ukraine as altruistic.
Instead, they see the war as the front line of a wider conflict already raging between Russia and the West, one that Putin will only seek to expand — possibly into other European countries — if he emerges with a win in Ukraine.
Cutting aid to Ukraine would not achieve a “sustainable peace” that Trump and his team say they want, so this argument goes, but rather allow the Kremlin to regroup ready for its next aggression — knowing that the U.S. no longer has the appetite to punish it.
“Cutting the current flow of aid to Ukraine would directly undermine President Trump’s stated goal of achieving a sustainable peace in Ukraine,” according to an analysis the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington defense think tank, published Monday before the news came through.
Though Russia has been making slow battlefield gains, American weapons have been allowing Ukraine to inflict “unsustainable losses on Russian forces while holding them to marginal gains,” the institute said. This “offers the United States great leverage in peace negotiations,” it added, warning that “a suspension of ongoing U.S. military assistance to Ukraine would encourage Russian President Vladimir Putin to continue to increase his demands and fuel his conviction that he can achieve total victory through war.”
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