This September had a few surprises up its sleeve for us all. Since last week, Germany has made a total of around €620 million in funding available for additional assistance for Ukraine.
The majority of which is to be provided to Ukraine over the next three months. Let’s have a closer look at them.
~€400 million in additional military aid approved
The majority of the recently approved and announced funds are allocated to the military assistance for Ukraine, which will probably cause many to breathe a sigh of relief.
Germany is providing Ukraine with a further ~€400 million in military aid this year. According to SPIEGEL, the additional €397 million are available because energy costs for the Bundeswehr were calculated too high. The funds are therefore now being reallocated and used to increase Germany’s assistance to Ukraine.
According to the German government, additional air defence, tanks, drones, ammunition, and spare parts can be procured for the Ukrainian armed forces.
However, I think it is unlikely that so many different kinds of material can be procured with less than €400 million, especially when you consider how expensive modern air defence and reasonable amounts of ammunition or tanks are.
I think it is more likely that these funds will be used to finance larger spare parts packages and other minor purchases, as various media have already reported in the past.
The allocation of additional funds is based on a request submitted by the German Ministry of Defence back in May 2024. At that time, around €3.8 billion in additional funds were requested, as all originally allocated funds for the military assistance of Ukraine for 2024 had already been earmarked and bound.
Although some of these funds had already been earmarked, they might had not yet been announced. Just to name one example, for this reason, 12 additional PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers were recently announced, even though no additional funds had been available since May.
Although around €3.4 billion less are now being made available than originally requested, it should not be forgotten that, on the one hand, the amount of funds made available are always less than requested and, on the other, that things did not look good for a long time and that we should actually be happy that around €400 million are being made available for Ukraine at all.
Just last week, Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius surprisingly confirmed that the talks were close to being concluded and that further assistance would be made available. I will definitely keep you up to date on what will really be procured with these additional funds.
€170 million in aid for the coming winter
Alongside additional military assistance, there will also be further humanitarian assistance provided by Germany. Both the Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development have announced additional aid packages to help Ukraine through the coming winter.
Already last week, at the Ministerial Conference of the Moldova Partnership Platform in Chișinău, Germany’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Annalena Baerbock announced a “winter package” totalling €100 million, which is urgently needed due to the ongoing Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Even more assistance was announced just yesterday. The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development is mobilising another €70 million to provide Ukrainian cities and municipalities with smaller combined heat and power plants, boilers, generators and solar energy systems.
The goal is to provide community centres, hospitals, schools, and other social facilities in particular with a more secure and independent energy supply. Special focus is placed on Ukrainian municipalities that have taken in internally displaced individuals.
A spokesperson for the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development confirmed to me in response to my enquiry that these funds are not included in the €100 million that were announced last week, just in case someone might think that.
€50 million for the treatment of Ukrainian war wounded in Germany
The last up to €50 million are funds to ensure the continued treatment of war-wounded Ukrainian soldiers and certainly also civilians in German hospitals.
War-wounded Ukrainians were evacuated to Germany for the first time in March 2022. Since then, further evacuations have taken place regularly, most recently covered broadly by the media following the brutal attack by Russia on a children’s hospital in Kyiv.
Germany immediately pledged €4 million in emergency aid and €10 million to assist the reconstruction of the hospital, and also offered to take in some of the sick children and provide them with medical care in Germany.
Image: WHO UkraineGermany has already provided medical care for a total of 1,173 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, over 700 more than Norway, which has taken in the second-highest number of Ukrainians within the EU. In other words, roughly one in three Ukrainians who were evacuated via the EU’s UCPM mechanism were treated in Germany.
With the additional funds of up to €50 million that have now been made available, this trend will definitely continue.
If you liked this post, consider following me on X, Bluesky, or Telegram. If you like, you can also leave me a tip on Ko-fi.
