How much have America, Britain and the rest paid Ukraine in aid since the Russian invasion? And do they have any hope of getting money back in return?
These are big questions, and they’re likely to dominate much of the discussion in the coming months as Donald Trump pressurises his Ukrainian counterparts for a deal on ending the war. So let’s go through some of the answers.
First off, the question of who has given the most money to Ukraine rather depends on what you’re counting.
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If you’re looking solely at the amount of military support extended since 2022, the US has provided €64bn, compared with €62bn from European nations (including the UK).
But now include other types of support, such as humanitarian and financial assistance, and European support exceeds American (€132bn in total, compared with €114bn from the US).
Divide Europe into its constituent nations, on the other hand, and none of them individually comes anywhere close to the US quantity of aid.
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That being said, simple cash numbers aren’t an especially good measure of a country’s ability to pay.
Look at US support as a percentage of gross domestic product and it comes to 0.5% of GDP. That’s almost precisely the same as the aid from the UK.
Looked at through this prism, it’s other countries which are clearly the most generous: Denmark, Estonia and much of the Baltics providing around 2% of their GDP – a far bigger amount versus their ability to finance it.
Still, compare the aid this time around with previous amounts spent in other conflicts and they are nowhere close.
Lend-Lease during WWII, aid during the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and even the first Gulf War, involved significantly bigger outlays than currently being spent on Ukraine.
That goes not just for the US but also for the UK, Germany and Japan, all of which provided more aid to the Kuwaitis and other affected nations during the first Gulf War.
Even so, it’s clear that the US and others have put significant resources towards Ukraine.
President Trump has been talking recently about recouping $500bn from Ukraine in the form of revenues from mining rare earth metals.
This is, on the face of it, slightly odd. Rare earth metals represent an obscure corner of the periodic table and play a small if important role in electronics and military manufacturing.
The entire market is small – making it essentially implausible that, even if Ukraine suddenly produced the majority of the world’s supply, the president could expect that amount of revenue back in return.
More to the point, while there are a couple of rare earth deposits in Ukraine, they have languished, unexploited, for years. They are so expensive to mine no-one has worked out how to extract the elements and make a profit at the same time.
And even if you presumed they could do, Ukraine would still be a relative minnow in global rare earths production.
Read more:
What minerals does Ukraine have?
Assuming, as one probably should, that Donald Trump didn’t just mean rare earths, but was talking more broadly about “critical minerals” (the two are different things, but let’s not get too pedantic here), there are also one or two other promising mine sites in the country.
There is an old, shuttered alumina plant seized from Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. There is a large lithium resource which could, if all went well, be the single biggest lithium mine in Europe.
Yet even taking this into account, Ukraine would still be a relatively small player in global lithium. Not nothing – but not world changing either. Certainly not enough to generate the hundreds of billions of dollars Mr Trump is seeking.
Then again, Ukraine has other resources at its disposal too: vast seams of coal in the Donbas, large iron ore reserves in the south of the country.
Both of these are in or close to Russian occupied areas – which might, from the Ukrainians’ perspective, actually be the point. Old fashioned as this stuff is, it does actually generate significant revenue. It might be Donald Trump’s best hope for some payback.
