President Donald Trump is set to meet Friday with Russian leader Vladimir Putin to discuss the ongoing invasion of Ukraine but spent the past week making a lot of “absurd” claims about the conflict and its cost on American taxpayers, says CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale.
“The president has made this claim over and over again that the U.S. has supposedly provided triple the aid to Ukraine that Europe has,” Dale said Thursday during an appearance on “News Central.”
Trump has falsely argued as much on several occasions over the past six months. He claimed in February that the U.S. has given Ukraine $350 billion worth of aid, and that Europe has spent $100 billion. Trump reiterated those figures Thursday at the White House.
CNN aired footage of the moment before Dale debunked it: “That $350 billion figure and that $100 billion figure is not only not accurate, it’s a reversal of reality. In reality, it is Europe that has provided more wartime aid to Ukraine than the United States has.”
He went on to cite the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank tracking these wartime aid quantities, in noting the U.S. allocated some $134 billion for Ukraine — compared to around $195 billion from Europe — from February 2022 through June 2025.
