what is France’s share of international aid to kyiv?

After obtaining security guarantees for his country from Berlin and Paris, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky returned to Germany in Munich on Saturday February 17 to address Western leaders and ensure broad mobilization in favor of his country. The German Kiel Institute took the opportunity to make public, on Friday, the latest version of its index of aid provided to Ukraine by different countries.

According to the Kiel Institute’s calculations, aggregating in value the financial, humanitarian and military aid promised to Ukraine, France finds itself in 15th place among contributing countries. Note that this ranking does not include Friday’s announcements and the bilateral agreements signed with Germany and France. Because Paris is committed to supplying in 2024 “up to three billion euros” military aid “additional” in kyiv.

Magnified values?

These classifications make the French government scream but they correspond to a reality: the translation into market value, in particular of military equipment. Except that not everyone plays the same game, notes Christoph Trebesh, research director of the Kiel Institute: “The problem is that some countries use replacement values: they will value the old guns from the 1990s that they deliver at the price of the guns they buy to replace them.”

The Kiel Institute is therefore keen to correct these values ​​which it often considers to be inflated, as in a French parliamentary report dating from 2023 and which announces 1.7 billion euros in arms sales to Ukraine. “They are talking about a total sum of 1.7 billion euros. We dug deep to try to understand where this 1.7 billion came from but we only came up with 700 million.”

A consolation for Paris all the same: by aggregating the volumes of aid given bilaterally and those given to Ukraine via the various European mechanisms, France is the third contributing country, behind the United States and Germany.