Western Allies to plan assistance to Ukraine for a longer period of time

Since the beginning of the year, Ukraine has received fewer new promises, with some exceptions, to supply arms, but the commitments become more long-term.

This is revealed from a new Ukraine Support Tracker study prepared by the Kiel Institute of World Economics, Ukrinform reports.

Compared to December 2022, there has been an overall decrease in the amount of new aid pledged to Ukraine. During the new period covered by the study, from January 16 to February 24, 2023, Ukraine received €12.96 billion, with a significant majority of these funds coming from just a few donors. For example, Japan and the Scandinavian countries promised to provide significant support to Ukraine in early 2023.

The most notable are the Scandinavian countries: Norway (€1.11 billion, an increase of 90%), Sweden (€0.33 billion, plus 41%), Denmark (€0.24 billion, plus 33%), and Finland (€0.56 billion, plus 165%).

Japan has pledged significant new financial assistance worth €5.1 billion in loans, and the Netherlands has pledged €2.5 billion, earmarked, among other things, for a new Patriot system for Ukraine.

A new trend in aid to Ukraine is the adoption of "longer planning horizons." Previously, aid commitments were short-term and difficult to predict. Only the United States made commitments for an entire fiscal year. Now other countries, such as the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, follow this model, pledging the same amount of aid in 2023 as in 2022. Norway has even announced a multi-year program to support Ukraine with financial and military assistance worth approximately 7 billion euros over the next five years, the study concluded.

“The development towards one-year or multi-year plans in the Ukraine aid is to be assessed very positively. So far there has been a tangle of individual national commitments. This greatly complicated budget and military planning in Ukraine. It is gratifying that some Western governments are now going ahead and making medium-term commitments,” Christoph Trebesch, leader of the team creating the Ukraine Support Tracker and research center director at IfW Kiel said.

The Ukraine Support Tracker provides a list and quantitative assessment of military, financial and humanitarian assistance pledged to Ukraine since January 24, 2022 (currently through February 24, 2023). The analysis covers 40 countries, including the EU, and other G7 members, as well as Australia, South Korea, Norway, New Zealand, Switzerland, Turkey, China, Taiwan, and India. In addition, the EU institutions are included as separate donors. The tracker lists government-level commitments; private donations or donations from international organizations such as the IMF are not included in the main database.

The database combines official government sources with information from international media.