ANALYSIS: Trump Says Europe Is Freeloading on Ukraine, But the Actual Numbers Are Bigly Different

Former US President Donald Trump in a major interview with Time magazine charged – again – that Europe isn’t helping out as it should with financial support and arms to Ukraine it should, and that American taxpayers are being taken for a ride, but fact-checks by Time and more in-depth fact-checks by Kyiv Post show reality doesn’t mesh with his narrative.

According to Trump, he supports Ukraine and wants to prevent aggression in the Old World, but Europe isn’t paying anything close to its fair share on the Russo-Ukraine War and deterring the Kremlin. And American largesse and patience has its limits, he said.   

“I want nothing bad to happen to Europe, I love Europe, I love the people of Europe, I have a great relationship with Europe. But they’ve taken advantage of us, both on NATO and on Ukraine. We’re in for billions of dollars more than they’re in in Ukraine. It shouldn’t be that way. It should be the opposite way,” Trump said in part. “Europe has to get there also and do their job. They’re not doing their job. Europe is not paying their fair share.”

Trump doubled down on the narrative that Europe is delinquent on security spending and that the US is being left holding the tab elsewhere in the interview: “Europe has to pay. We are in for so much more than the European nations. It’s very unfair to us. And I said if Europe isn’t going to pay, who are gravely more affected than we are. If Europe is not going to pay, why should we pay?

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With Russia’s full-scale invasion approaching the 1,000-day mark, 3.7 million people have already been displaced inside Ukraine and around 6.7 million have fled as refugees, according to UN figures.

For a full transcript of the interview click here.

But a comparison of Trump’s claims of European stinginess and expansive American largesse to the actual numbers on foreign support to Ukraine by all states since Russia’s Feb. 2024 invasion doesn’t support that narrative.

Based on data published by individual states, Europe and not the US is Ukraine’s primary source of international assistance and has been so for months. European leadership in assistance to Ukraine is undeniable and widening, independent monitoring agencies report.

Thanks in part to a near four-month total halt to all US assistance to Ukraine, from January through late April, the gap between US support to Ukraine and European support to Ukraine is already distinct, and it’s in Europe’s favor, data compiled on state-to-state assistance by the Kiel Institute for World Economy (KIWE) shows.

According to findings published by that Germany-based independent research group, the value of international financial and military assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s Feb. 2022 invasion from European states to date has been worth some $95.2 billion. That number is money or materiel allocated, as opposed to promised, researchers said.

The United States, over the same period, has committed $71.8 billion to Ukraine in all forms of assistance, an April 24 report compiled by KIWE researchers found.

That finding directly contradicts Trump’s claim that US commitments to Ukraine are “billions more” than Europe’s.

A second Trump gripe about Europe, that clever Brussels politicians are taking advantage of American generosity and good nature, also seemed at least unsubstantiated, and possibly invented, when national burden-sharing is computed. By most estimates, the ballpark size of the EU economy is equivalent to $15.5 trillion annually, while the comparable figure for the US is substantially larger, around $25.4 trillion for FY 2024.

Based on overall contribution figures referenced to the size of economies, for every dollar’s worth of support the US sends to Ukraine EU states send $1.25. The average individual European citizen is coughing almost three times (Kyiv Post’s back-of-envelope calculation was 2.795 times) as much to tax collectors to help out Ukraine than their American counterpart.

Claims Europeans are not paying their fair share on Ukraine are even more difficult to substantiate if compared using the measure of GDP relative to the total population, i.e., GDP per capita. By that metric, Europeans such as in the Baltic states, Denmark, Poland, and Finland, are spending between one and two percent of their entire national GDP on Ukraine assistance.

US citizens, by that measure, are sharing a Ukraine assistance burden at least three times and as much as six times less than European citizens living in those countries, KIWE researchers found.

Kyiv Post reviews of previous KIEW reports, statements by individual states and aid updates published by Ukraine Finance Ministry found the KIEW April 24 estimates to be consistent with other officially published data. Kyiv Post first reported overall European assistance to Ukraine was edging out US assistance in total value, in January.

Kyiv Post was unable to determine whether Trump was either unaware of official, state-published data of actual international support both promised to and received by Ukraine, or he was aware of data and ignored it when commenting to Time. Kyiv Post asked President Trump’s office for comment but had not received a response to that request by the time this article was published.

An April 25 KIEW statement cautioned that future estimates of international assistance to Ukraine should be measured not in aid promised, but in actual allocations of money, and noted that in terms of pure military aid European and American assistance to Ukraine are almost exactly equivalent at around $42.5 billion since the start of the Russo-Ukraine War.

But were promises of future aid long-term to become real Ukrainian assistance, and receive allocated funding, the US-European wedge would widen and in the opposite direction Trump complained to Time magazine – currently the figures are the US, $3.53 billion, and Europe, $87.6 billion.

Trump’s remarks regarding Ukraine focused on money and the relative weight of purported fiscal commitments, and effectively ignored political decision-making – in particular a 3-month+ impasse in Congress on US aid to Ukraine, at times dragged out because Trump intervened in cross-party negotiations inside the House.

Also unmentioned by Trump was a pair of critical European victories on pushing cross-continent support to Ukraine in the early months of 2024, during the US stop to all assistance.

On Feb 1. the European Commission approved a €50 billion ($53.4 billion) financing program called the “Ukraine Facility.” The funding project committed Brussels and EU member state taxpayers to transfer money to Kyiv in grants or highly concessional loans, to pay government worker salaries including paychecks for Kyiv’s close to one million service personnel, pensions, and state services and infrastructure support.

By late March a Czech-led initiative had found political and financial backing in the form of individual state contributions worth at least $1.5 billion to locate on international markets and ship to Ukraine 800,000 critically needed artillery shells, in large part because American shell supplies had dried up at the end of 2023.

A little peculiarly, a Time magazine fact-check report on the Trump interview, published on April 30, did not challenge the former US President’s claim America is paying through the nose for Ukraine and Europe is doing close to nothing. Instead, the 4,000+ word Time review of Trump’s statements for accuracy did not mention the word “Ukraine” even once.