What Ukraine Loses With US Aid Pause, and What It Doesn’t

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.

Servicemen of the 24th Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces fire a BM-21 Grad multiple-launch rocket system near the town of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on Feb. 23, 2025. Oleg Petrasiuk/Handout via Reuters

Ukraine is set to lose access to a suite of high-tech weaponry and other equipment following a pause on all U.S. 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 President 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. Department of Defense (DOD) 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 March 4.

In the aftermath, national leaders throughout Europe have leapt to action in cobbling together a nascent plan to turbocharge European defense spending by roughly $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,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.

It is unclear how soon Ukraine will begin to feel the battlefield effect of the U.S. aid pause. Ukraine is not as dependent on the United States as it was at the beginning of the war, but it 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 toward a peace agreement with Russia 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 UK, and NATO, and that Ukraine would be receiving additional air defense systems and missiles from the European Commission.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy prepares for a plenary meeting at Lancaster House during the European leaders' summit in London on March 2, 2025. Justin Tallis - WPA Pool/Getty Images

Aid to Ukraine by the Numbers

Trump’s sudden severing of assistance to Ukraine jolted international leaders, although there are already rumblings from the White House that a key rare earth deal tied to a cease-fire could be signed in the coming weeks.

Whatever happens, the loss of U.S. aid would be a major blow to Ukraine’s war effort, but it would not immediately cripple the country.

Europe is the largest provider of aid to Ukraine despite having a smaller economy than the United States’, and European Union 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 gross domestic product 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 to December 2024.

The United States provided about $120 billion in aid during that same time period.

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 about $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 U.S. 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’s worth of arms and munitions directly from U.S. stockpiles to a foreign nation.

The value of those arms is then paid out to U.S. defense companies to replenish the U.S. stockpiles with new and better weapons.

However, the Pentagon has classified mandatory minimum limits for many of its munitions and so 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 each provide about one-quarter of Ukraine’s military supplies, while Ukraine produces the rest with its rapidly growing domestic defense industry or through international arms purchases.

A convoy of Ukraine-bound Bradley Fighting Vehicles boards the carrier ARC Integrity at the Transportation Core Dock in North Charleston, S.C., on Jan. 25, 2023. U.S. Transportation Command/Oz Suguitan/Handout via REUTERS

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 reliant on a few advanced weapons platforms that can be obtained only 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. However, it is exclusively produced by the United States and is 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 2025 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 had 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 Ukraine with a suite of High-Speed Anti-Radiation Missiles, 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 U.S. system with European OneWeb satellites.

The United States has also provided hundreds of armored fighting vehicles, dozens of tanks, thousands of short-range rockets and drones, and millions of rounds of artillery munitions to Ukraine, but those items have become easier to replace domestically or through European sources.

Ukrainian servicemen walk past a Patriot air defense system at an undisclosed area on Aug. 4, 2024. Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images

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 U.S. 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.