MOSCOW, December 26. /TASS/. The West spends over $375 billion over the course of Ukraine’s war against Russia; the United States and Europe continue their tech spat; and fears brew about EU collapse. These stories topped Friday’s newspaper headlines across Russia.
As the debate rages in the West on the use of Russia’s frozen assets, Vedomosti crunched the numbers to get a feel for how the Ukraine aid landscape was changing, if at all. For 2025, the figures thus show a marked decline in support for the embattled country.
NATO countries have provided more than $375 billion in aid to Kiev since 2022, data from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Ukrainian Finance Ministry shows. Almost $94 billion was spent on Ukraine annually, which, adjusted for inflation, is about as much as the Americans spent annually on the Vietnam and Afghanistan wars. In 2025, monthly assistance to Ukraine dropped by 11%, from $8.7 billion to $7.7 billion.
On December 19, an EU summit agreed to issue an interest-free loan of 90 billion euros to Ukraine in 2026-2027. Kiev also expected to get 140 billion euros of Russia's frozen assets but Europe could not reach a consensus on that move. EU nations decided against confiscating Russian assets out of concern about lawsuits and retaliatory measures by Russia, which has access to a treasure trove of assets belonging to European investors, said Prokhor Tebin, director of the Military and Economic Research Center at the Higher School of Economics. The move would have undermined trust in the euro as a reserve currency, economist Oleg Komolov pointed out.
