$400 million: Trump Refused to Provide Ukraine with Approved Military Aid
22 July 18:14
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has refused to provide Ukraine with $400 million in approved military aid, Senator Dick Durbin said during a hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. This was reported by "Komersant Ukrainian", citing Reuters.
According to him, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the allocation of these funds to Kyiv in 2026 last September, and Trump signed the corresponding bill, but the aid has not yet been provided. Durbin noted that the decision on how to spend this money will now be made by the new U.S. president, “whoever that may be,” in 2029.
Prior to this, Senator Mitch McConnell, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Defense Appropriations, criticized Pentagon leadership for the delay in spending the funds.
“Aid to Ukraine, which we approved several months ago, is now gathering dust at the Pentagon,” McConnell wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post.
At the time, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hagseth claimed that the Pentagon had allocated $400 million in aid to Ukraine. According to him, the funding “was intended to strengthen European capabilities,” but he did not provide any further details.
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However, Hagseth later stated that the Senate should provide additional funding to the U.S. armed forces, not to Ukraine. He emphasized that without additional funds, the U.S. military would have to cut current and future personnel training programs. Hegset noted that President Joe Biden’s administration had failed to provide the military with the necessary level of funding, had transferred weapons to Ukraine, and had postponed important maintenance work.
U.S. military support for Ukraine began to increase following the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Since the Russian army’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the total amount of aid to Ukraine under various programs has exceeded $60 billion. However, with Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, the allocation of new aid packages effectively ceased. Under pressure from Democrats, only symbolic amounts—several hundred million dollars—were included in the budgets for 2025 and 2026.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration did not include funding for military aid to Ukraine under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) in the draft defense budget for fiscal year 2027. The USAI program has been in effect since 2016 and is one of the main channels of military support for Kyiv, allowing the Pentagon to place orders for weapons and equipment for the Armed Forces of Ukraine directly with manufacturers.
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