Military aid to Ukraine drops sharply despite new NATO initiative
Military aid to Ukraine fell sharply in July and August 2025, despite the introduction of NATO's Priority Ukraine Needs List (PURL) initiative, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy reports, based on updated data from the Ukraine Support Tracker, which tracks international aid flows to Ukraine.
The latest update of the tracker also shows that financial and humanitarian aid, on the other hand, remained stable and is provided mainly by EU institutions.
Most of the military aid during the observation period came under NATO's new PURL initiative. It was agreed in July at a meeting between NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and US President Donald Trump and allows NATO to purchase "ready-to-use" weapons for Ukraine from US warehouses, financed by other member states. By August, eight NATO countries had joined the initiative: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. They have allocated a total of EUR 1.9 billion.
Despite the launch of the new mechanism, military aid in July and August decreased significantly. After the US stopped announcing new aid packages in early 2025, European countries stepped in and significantly expanded their military support. As a result, the average monthly volume of military aid in the first half of 2025 exceeded the figures for 2022–2024, despite the absence of contributions from the US. However, this dynamic changed dramatically in the summer: military allocations of European countries decreased by 57% compared to January–June 2025, even taking into account their contributions to NATO’s PURL initiative. Thus, the average monthly volume of all military aid in this period was 43% lower than the level in the first half of 2025.
In absolute figures, the volume of military assistance to Ukraine, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker, was distributed as follows: the average monthly figure for 2022-2024 was about EUR 3.5 billion, the average monthly figure for January-June 2025 was about EUR 4 billion, and the average monthly figure for July-August 2025 was about EUR 2.3 billion.