Lavrov Says Only Trump Claimed India Would Halt Russian Oil Purchases

The European Parliament on Wednesday approved a €90-billion loan package for Ukraine, offering a crucial financial lifeline to Kyiv nearly four years into Russia’s invasion.

Lawmakers backed the measure by 458 votes to 140. The loan is designed to cover roughly two-thirds of Ukraine’s projected financial needs for 2026 and 2027 and will be guaranteed by the EU’s common budget, after earlier proposals to use frozen Russian central bank assets were dropped.

Meanwhile, military assistance to Ukraine fell to its lowest level in 2025 following a halt in US funding, leaving Europe to shoulder the bulk of support, according to the Kiel Institute.

Kyiv’s allies allocated €36 billion ($42.9 billion) in military aid in 2025, a 14-percent decline from €41.1 billion the previous year, the Germany-based think tank said. The institute tracks military, financial, and humanitarian assistance pledged and delivered to Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Notably, military aid in 2025 was even lower than in 2022, despite the invasion beginning only in late February of that year.

US assistance stopped entirely after President Donald Trump’s return to the White House in early 2025. Between 2022 and 2024, Washington had provided roughly half of all military aid to Ukraine.

European nations moved to fill the gap, increasing their collective allocations by 67 percent compared with the 2022-2024 average. Without that effort, the impact of US cuts could have been far more severe, the institute said.

However, Kiel highlighted widening imbalances among European donors. Northern and Western European countries accounted for about 95 percent of Europe’s military assistance.

Northern European nations — including Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden — contributed 33 percent of total European military aid in 2025, despite representing only eight percent of the donors’ combined GDP. By contrast, Southern Europe, which makes up 19 percent of GDP, provided just three percent.

To offset the shortfall left by the United States, NATO launched the PURL programme, under which European donors purchased US-made weapons for Ukraine, amounting to €3.7 billion in 2025.

Kiel described the initiative as a “notable development,” enabling the acquisition of key systems such as Patriot air-defense batteries and HIMARS rocket launchers.

European countries have also increasingly turned to Ukraine’s domestic defence industry, building on a procurement strategy first adopted by Denmark in 2024.

Ukraine’s defence production capacity has expanded dramatically — growing “by a factor of 35” since 2022, according to Kiel — though funding constraints have prevented Kyiv from fully utilising that capacity.

Orders from 11 European countries helped sustain production last year. In the second half of 2025, domestically sourced weapons accounted for 22 percent of Ukraine’s procurement, a record high.