European support will ensure that Ukraine stays in the fight, but the United States’ pause on aid to Ukraine will end access to several key weapons platforms.
Ukraine is set to lose access to a suite of high-tech weaponry and other equipment following a pause on all American aid to the embattled nation.
U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly paused assistance to Ukraine on March 4, following a highly-publicized spat with Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week over the terms of a possible cease-fire deal.
That pause affects every dollar of assistance from the Pentagon, including intelligence sharing and other non-weapon aid, according to a U.S. defense official.
“At 6 p.m. last night, the order to pause all aid for Ukraine was given to the DOD, including aid that was en route,” the official told The Epoch Times in an email on Tuesday.
In the aftermath, national leaders throughout Europe have leapt to action in cobbling together a nascent plan to turbo-charge European defense spending by $840 billion.
“We are in an era of rearmament, and Europe is ready to massively increase its spending, both to respond to the short-term urgency to act and to support Ukraine, but also to invest in the long term, to take on more responsibility for our own European security,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
It’s unclear how soon Ukraine will begin to feel the battlefield effect of the U.S. aid pause. Kyiv is not as dependent on the United States as it was at the beginning of the war, but still relies on Washington for several vital weapons systems.
Zelenskyy wrote on social media platform X that Ukraine remained committed to pursuing a just and lasting peace, and outlined a path towards a peace agreement with Moscow including prisoner exchanges and halts to air and sea attacks.
“None of us wants an endless war,” Zelenskyy wrote. “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer. Nobody wants peace more than Ukrainians.”
Zelenskyy added later in the day that he had spoken with leadership from Croatia, Finland, Germany, Greece, the United Kingdom, and NATO, and that Kyiv would be receiving additional air defense systems and missiles from the European Commission.
Aid to Ukraine by the Numbers
Trump’s sudden severing of assistance to Ukraine jolted international leaders, though there are already rumblings from the White House that a key rare earth deal tied to a cease-fire could now be signed in the coming weeks.
Whatever happens, the loss of American aid would be a major blow to Kyiv’s war effort, but would not immediately cripple Ukraine.
Europe is the largest provider of aid to Ukraine despite having a smaller economy than the United States, and EU nations have as a whole more than doubled defense spending since reaching historic lows in 2015.
Some nations on Europe’s easternmost flank have even spent the majority of all defense spending on Ukraine, with Estonia spending more than 2 percent of its total GDP on assistance to Ukraine.
According to the German Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks international aid flows to Ukraine, Europe provided $139 billion in financial, military, and humanitarian assistance to Kyiv from January 2022 through December 2024.
For comparison, the United States provided about $120 billion in aid during that same time period.
It is important to note that those numbers do not include indirect assistance to allied nations that might benefit Ukraine, nor do they account for the fact that the United States originally committed more funds to Ukraine than it actually ended up spending.
In all, Congress appropriated around $180 billion for Ukraine from 2022 through 2024, but the United States did not deploy the full earmarked amount for various reasons, including constraints on American stockpiles and a freeze on foreign military financing.
In all, the United States has spent about $67 billion on security assistance for Ukraine, with the bulk of that spending coming through the presidential drawdown authority.
Presidential drawdown authority works by allowing the president to transfer a Congressionally-approved dollar amount worth of arms and munitions directly from American stockpiles to a foreign nation.
The value of those arms is then paid out to American defense companies to replenish the U.S. stockpiles with new and better weapons.
The Pentagon has classified mandatory minimum limits for many of its munitions, however, and was unable to ship as many weapons to Ukraine as originally intended because doing so would diminish U.S. stocks to a level below those required minimums.
At present, the United States and Europe provide about a quarter of Ukraine’s military supplies each, while Ukraine produces the rest with its rapidly growing domestic defense industry or finances international arms purchases.
Ukraine Dependent on Advanced Weapon Systems
While Ukraine may still be able to maintain artillery stockpiles and produce its own drones without U.S. assistance, Kyiv is incredibly reliant on a few advanced weapons platforms that can only be obtained from the United States.
Foremost among those systems is the Patriot missile system.
The Patriot system was first transferred to Ukraine at the end of 2022, and helped Kyiv to prevent Russia from gaining air superiority over the nation, thereby enabling several counteroffensives in the following two years.
The system is vital to Ukraine for its ability to intercept ballistic missiles, including hypersonic systems. It is, however, exclusively produced by the United States and too valuable to be deployed near the front lines.
There are secondary market options for Ukraine, but they may require U.S. approval.
Israel began transferring several retired Patriot systems to Ukraine at the beginning of the year under the Biden administration, for example, but it is unclear if the required refurbishing, which was to be done in the United States, was finished before Trump’s pause on aid.
Ukraine has also received 39 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), which provide Kyiv with an invaluable rocket capability against Russian forces.
Alongside the HIMARS, the Biden administration secretly granted Ukraine access to the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) in late 2024.
The ATACMS is a short-range ballistic missile that has allowed Kyiv to strike key Russian targets behind enemy lines, including airfields, command centers, and supply chains.
Controversially, President Joe Biden announced in late 2024 that he cleared Ukraine to use the ATACMS against a limited subset of targets within Russia and near the front lines.
The United States has also provided a suite of High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles (HARMs) to Ukraine, which are central to Kyiv’s efforts to locate and destroy Russian radar systems used against Ukrainian air units.
Beyond weapons systems, Kyiv also relies on Washington for some intelligence sharing that helps its forces identify Russian troop movements and select targets for Ukrainian strikes.
There also remains the issue of Ukraine’s reliance on U.S. commercial products, namely Elon Musk’s Starlink, which has been used to maintain communications on the front line.
Currently, Ukraine maintains access to Starlink but could replace the American system with European OneWeb satellites.
The United States has also provided hundreds of armored fighting vehicles, dozens of tanks, and thousands of short-range rockets and drones to Ukraine, as well as millions of rounds of artillery munitions, but those items have become easier to replace domestically or through European sources.
To that end, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen told reporters on March 4 that Europe would have to work quickly and invest deeply to maintain Ukraine’s defenses in the absence of advanced American weapons.
“There are some things that the Ukrainians are completely dependent on with regards to the Americans,” Poulsen said.
“These include the missiles used in the Patriot air defense system, which is American. So this will put Europe in a situation where we now really need to do more ourselves to help Ukraine.”
The White House did not return a request for comment by publication time.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.