The outgoing US administration has left $4bn in president drawdown authority (PDA) funding unspent before handover to returning President-elect Donald Trump, providing a final $500m military assistance package, comprising mainly of munitions and aircraft spares.
It had been anticipated that outgoing President Joe Biden would seek to use the final days of his term in office to provide large-scale package to Ukraine, which has been the recipient of $65.9bn in US funding since Russia’s invasion of its neighbour in February 2022.
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By GlobalDataA US Department of Defense (DoD) spokesperson, in a 10 January press briefing, confirmed $4bn in PDA funding would be left unspent when the current administration leaves office on 20 January.
“The next administration will get the opportunity to use [the funding] for Ukraine,” the spokesperson said.
Military equipment provided by the US to Ukraine, funded through mechanisms such as the PDA, include more than 2,000 armoured personnel carriers, dozens of Abrams M1A1 and T-72A tanks, and hundreds of artillery systems and guided rocket launchers.
Will Trump continue US support for Ukraine?
The return of President Trump to office in the coming days has created uncertainty over the continued provision of PDA funding and military equipment to Ukraine, which is reliant of external support as it continues to fight against Russian forces, nearly three years after Moscow’s large-scale invasion.
President-elect Trump has pledged to end the Ukraine-Russia war, stating prior to his election victory in 2024 that he would stop the conflict inside 24 hours of assuming office. However, in 2025 Trump has shifted position, apparently accepting that finding common ground between the two sides who have lost hundreds of thousands of military casualties could take some time.
In an interview with Fox News on 11 January Keith Kellogg, retired US Army general and Trump’s selection for the role of special peace envoy, said a peace deal could be agreed within “100 days”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who enjoyed relatively good relations with Trump during the president-elect’s first term, could also be looking for a way to end the war, as long as terms are favourable. This could include the formal occupation of lands annexed from Ukraine since 2022 and certainly see Ukraine ceding the Crimean Peninsula to Russia, which was seized by Moscow in 2014.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy held a brief meeting with Trump during a visit to the US in 2024, but relations with the incoming US administration will not be anywhere near as cordial as they have been under President Biden.
Any loss in Ukraine funding would have to be met with an increase from its European backers, with countries such as France, Germany, and the UK providing tens of billions of dollars.
Trump is also a vocal critic of Nato, an alliance that Ukraine has aspirations to join, and has recently mooted the potential seizure of Greenland, which is an autonomous territory of Nato member Denmark.
US puts Russia’s war casualties at 700,000
Determining combat casualties on both sides of the Ukraine-Russia war is difficult to determine, with no independent verification possible. Ukraine is moving to digitise its own recording of combat operations, although this is still unable to be independently assessed.
However, the US DoD provided its own updated figures on 10 January, stating that Russia had suffered “more than 700,000 casualties”, a number that aligns relatively closely with Ukraine’s own claims. Earlier in January, Kyiv stated Russian casualties had crossed the 800,000 mark.
It is unknown how many combat casualties Ukraine has sustained in nearly three years of combat since Russia’s large-scale invasion, with the figure held at state secret level.
However, given the attritional nature of operations, with conditions reminiscent of trench combat seen during World War 1, it is likely that Ukraine has also suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties.
