How America’s Aid to Ukraine Actually Works

It’s been nearly three months since President Biden signed the long-delayed and much-awaited Ukraine supplemental appropriations act, which allocated $62 billion to help Ukraine fight off the Russian full-scale invasion.

So why, six military aid packages later, has U.S. assistance failed to make a meaningful difference on Ukraine’s frontlines? Why have Russian forces continued to advance despite billions of dollars’ worth of promised military spending?

The reason is that after Congress finally acted, aid delivery has been proceeding slowly—at least, too slowly by Ukrainian lights. “The United States gives us too little to even stop Russia from advancing,” Ukrainian military analyst Ivan Kyrychevskyi said in an interview. Karolina Hird, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, sees this as a problem of both scale and speed. “Western aid is not yet necessarily arriving at the scale necessary for Ukrainian forces to fully turn the tide,” she added.

There’s also a third problem: the type of assistance. The last six aid packages, all made possible by the supplemental appropriations act, included many shells and air defense munitions but not enough long-range capabilities.

To be sure, the aid has made some difference. Months before the long-awaited supplemental funding was passed, when Ukraine was facing a serious shortage of interceptors for its air defense systems, the Kremlin began capitalizing on the mayhem in Congress. Russia targeted Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure, severely damaging the country’s largest hydroelectric power plant and destroying nearly all of the energy infrastructure in the city of Kharkiv, as well as other power plants around the country. Every assistance package passed since April has included air defense munitions to patch up this vulnerability, as Ukraine rushes to repair its energy grid.

And some analysts, including Hird, say American deliveries helped Ukraine stabilize the front, especially in northern Kharkiv Oblast, where Russians launched a short-lived but costly offensive in early May. 

Yet Ukrainian analysts and officials are careful about drawing such connections, saying that Ukraine hasn’t yet received enough aid to see a decisive difference on the front line.

“You can’t really say that Russians stopped [in the Kharkiv area] because they were met with intense fire,” said Kyrychevskyi.

Responding to a request for comment, Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense emphasized the country’s acute need for high-precision and long-range weapons to hit Russian airfields and weapons caches inside Russia.

“Our artillery units are getting more ammunition,” the statement concedes. “But the number of shells provided to us by our Western allies is not yet sufficient to satiate all areas of the front, and the Russian army still prevails in terms of artillery fire intensity.” The full statement is available here. A translation into English is available here.

Ukrainian calls for more aid might sound never-ending, but there is a big misconception about how much aid Ukraine truly needs, one Ukrainian defense official told me on condition of anonymity.

“They pledge to give us a million shells and announce it like it’s a huge deal. Meanwhile Russia sometimes spends that many shells in a number of weeks,” the official said.

There are actually a lot of misconceptions about the way U.S. security and financial assistance to Ukraine work.

Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. has poured tens of billions of dollars into the country’s attempt to survive. For many American voters and commentators, Ukraine aid headlines may evoke images of planes delivering palettes of cash to Kyiv, but this isn’t how the system works.

In reality, only a small percentage of the overall aid package takes the form of cash transfers to Kyiv; the vast majority goes right back into the U.S. economy through several federal government mechanisms.

One of the main mechanisms through which the U.S. provides security assistance to Ukraine is the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI)—a funding program led by the Department of Defense. Aimed at bolstering Ukraine’s armed forces, USAI provides funds for training and advising of Ukrainian military personnel, as well as for procurement of weapons. Nearly $32 billion has been allocated to USAI in three years of Russia’s all-out war.

The State Department’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program is a similar tool, yet its focus is not only on Ukraine but, rather, U.S. foreign policy goals more broadly. FMF helps American allies like Ukraine buy weapons specifically from U.S. manufacturers, supporting U.S. international interests and its military-industrial complex. FMF funding is not transferred to the recipient and is executed by American government agencies. Congress has allocated roughly $6.3 billion to this program for Ukraine security purposes since 2022. 

And then there is the Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which allows the president to authorize the provision of weapons or services from Defense Department stockpiles to partners. This mechanism provides almost immediate help to allies in emergencies, with assistance sometimes arriving within days of presidential approval. Between August 2021 and April 2024, the State Department used PDA 44 times, providing Ukraine with military assistance worth $23.8 billion.

The U.S. also sends direct financial assistance to the Ukrainian government through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The majority of USAID funds fill up Ukraine’s budget and keep the country’s government running by paying salaries to state employees. A fraction of those funds address humanitarian projects of one sort or another.

The State Department also supports development initiatives in Ukraine through its Economic Support Funds and provides aid to Ukrainian refugees.

Taken together, these tools form the almost continuous flow of security and financial assistance to Ukraine. 

The administration gets money for all these programs mainly through supplemental funding requests to Congress. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Congress has approved five Ukraine supplemental appropriation acts, worth a total worth of  $174.2 billion. 

But that figure can be misleading. Importantly, every supplemental includes many more dollars than end up directly in Ukraine. Things that also fall under the umbrella of “Ukraine aid” include the financing of increased U.S. military presence in Europe, intelligence operations vis-a-vis Ukraine and Russia, support of European states that have also been affected by Russia’s war, and every other activity in any way related to Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The majority of weapons and munitions the U.S. government has sent to Ukraine are pulled from America’s own stockpiles using presidential drawdowns, since this program allows for the quickest delivery. The supplementals then provide the Pentagon with funding to replenish those stockpiles, which it does primarily through the military contractors that build weapons for the U.S. military.

For example, the fifth supplemental covers the costs of the latest assistance package by giving money to the Pentagon to replenish its inventories of the air defense interceptors and artillery shells provided to Ukraine in April. The supplemental will also cover similar assistance packages this upcoming year. 

The $62 billion package, however, does nothing to lift some of the key limitations placed on the use and supply of certain American weapons to Ukraine.

For example, to much frustration in Kyiv, Ukraine is still not allowed to use its longest-range weapons, like the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), against military targets far away inside Russia. A recent relaxation of this policy allows Ukraine to use U.S. weapons to target forces inside of Russia who are actively targeting the Kharkiv area, but the general restrictions remain in place.

The package also doesn’t specifically pledge to provide the longest-range missiles the U.S. has; these are needed if Ukraine is to destroy Russian weapons caches and bases deep inside Russia that are being used to attack Ukrainian cities.

The Cost of Delay

Both the relief the current aid package has delivered and its limits highlight the degree of Ukrainian dependence on the United States right now. Indeed, it’s hard to underestimate just how much Ukraine relies on American aid for survival.

“Without (American) support, we don’t have a chance of winning,” Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told PBS.

The numbers speak for themselves: As of April 2024, the United States has allocated just over $80 billion in military, humanitarian, and financial aid to Ukraine, while European states and institutions have allocated $110 billion, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. Crucially, the U.S. remained the top donor of military assistance to Ukraine, allocating over $2.7 billion more than all European donors. The Kiel Institute defines allocated aid as aid that has already been delivered or is earmarked for delivery, as opposed to future pledges.

In other words, America is responsible for more than half of all military aid to Ukraine.

When the flow of aid stopped because of intra-Republican squabbling, the consequences for Ukraine were catastrophic.

The Ukraine-Russia artillery shell ratio fell as low as 1:10, Zelenskyy said in an interview on PBS NewsHour in April.

Commanders all across the frontline reported rationing munitions and losing men due to scarce resources.

“It is a great miracle that in such conditions the line of defense is where it is now and not further west or north,” Mykola Bielieskov, senior analyst at Ukraine’s Come Back Alive foundation and a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, said in an interview. He continued:

The loss of Avdiivka and the further movement of the frontline in that direction, the lost opportunity to inflict greater losses on the enemy …[,] the opportunity for Muscovy to gradually build up groups and open new fronts, the inability to better protect critical infrastructure and people …[,] all these are the consequences of the fact that since October 2023 the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been on starvation rations for munitions and weapons.

The fall of Avdiivka is widely perceived in Ukraine as a direct consequence of the temporary halt in American aid.

Analysis done by the New York Times also revealed that Ukraine’s air defense capabilities dropped significantly due to the halt of American aid.

Ukraine’s rate of interception of Russian missiles plummeted thanks to the munitions shortage, and Ukrainian military personnel had to make tragic choices about which missiles to let pass. This was exactly the case with the Trypilska power plant—the biggest power plant around Kyiv, on which much of the region depends for electricity. On April 11, Russia attacked the plant with 11 missiles. Ukraine intercepted only seven of them, deliberately opting to save interceptors instead of taking down all the missiles. Notably, such a damaging attack happened near Kyiv—the most protected area in the country with the best air defense systems, including the U.S.-made Patriot missile system, where Russian missiles almost never get through.

The latest aid packages have begun to alleviate shortfalls in both air defense and artillery shells—although deficits remain.

American Money Stays in America

Those who oppose America’s aid to Ukraine like to criticize the Biden administration for  “funding foreign wars.”

Yet most Ukraine aid bills fund America’s local industries.

The vast majority of U.S. Ukraine-related funding does not go directly to Ukraine; it stays in the U.S. economy, subsidizing the production of weapons in at least 31 states and 71 cities.

While Ukraine gets most of the aid in the form of old American weapons pulled from U.S. reserves, it’s American workers at American companies that make new weapons to replenish them.

America’s military-industrial complex also restocks inventories of its NATO allies who similarly help Ukraine.

Not only does this revitalize the communities around large manufacturing plants in mostly Republican states, but it has created so many high-level jobs that some places are struggling to find enough qualified workers. 

“We have right now more people working in the history of our state than we have at any point,” Mike Preston, Arkansas’s secretary of commerce told Politico back in September 2022. “And there are 70,000 open jobs in our state,” he added.

Corruption Allegations

Another concern around aid to Ukraine is corruption.

Without a doubt, Ukraine has a real corruption problem, just like many other states in the region. However, Ukraine is making strides, climbing three spots in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index in the past two years. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to rely on its own extensive anti-corruption system to make sure aid is distributed properly.

The Pentagon, the State Department, and USAID each have an inspector general, who investigates and reports on allegations of corruption and misappropriation of American aid. There is also a Ukraine Oversight Interagency Working Group, through which dozens of U.S. federal agencies work together to ensure proper oversight of U.S. taxpayer money. The working group’s special inspector general regularly reports to Congress, and the organization launched a website dedicated to greater transparency into all oversight-related operations, called UkraineOversight.gov.

The latest report published by the Defense Department’s inspector general highlighted several issues, including USAID’s inability to verify the accuracy of Ukrainian salaries paid with U.S. funds.

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On June 13, the U.S. and Ukraine signed a “historic” 10-year bilateral security agreement, pledging to strengthen security cooperation with a goal of building up Ukraine’s defense capabilities.

While both Biden and Zelenskyy championed the agreement, its ability to provide long-term assistance to Ukraine would come into serious question if Donald Trump were to return to the White House in January. The nonbinding agreement provides no commitments, after all, and it can be terminated by the president.

Trump’s track record and current rhetoric make him at least a grave concern with respect to honoring Biden’s promises; he has consistently questioned the magnitude of aid to Ukraine; he insults Zelensky; and he boasts about ending the war in 24 hours, which many view as a promise to force Ukrainian capitulation to the Kremlin. His solicitude for Russian President Vladimir Putin bewilders Ukrainians as much as it bewilders many Americans.

“If the Congress doesn’t help Ukraine, Ukraine will lose the war,” Zelenskyy said when the latest aid package was still stalled in Congress. As Nov. 5 approaches, the bigger problem facing Ukraine may now be the commitment of the executive branch to allowing Ukraine to continue the fight.