The draft US defense budget for fiscal year 2027 does not provide for funding for military assistance to Ukraine under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI). This became known during hearings in the US Senate Committee on Armed Services.
Points of attention
- The draft US defense budget for 2027 does not allocate funding for military assistance to Ukraine under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI).
- The Trump administration's 2027 budget request prioritizes record defense spending but does not include provisions for aid to Ukraine.
US not planning to provide military assistance to Ukraine in 2027
During the hearing, senators directly asked Pentagon representatives whether they understood correctly that the 2027 budget request did not include funding for the USAI program (assistance to Ukraine).
"Yes, that's right. There is no funding for USAI in this budget," said Acting Chief Financial Officer of the US Department of Defense, Jules Hurst.
USAI is one of the key programs of American military support to Ukraine. It allows the Pentagon to order weapons and military equipment for the Armed Forces of Ukraine directly from manufacturers.
It is important to note that the Trump administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2027 calls for record defense spending of about $1.5 trillion, a 50% increase from the current year.
This is only the administration's budget request. The final decision will be made by the US Congress. The process of reviewing and approving the defense budget traditionally takes several months, and the document itself can change significantly during its passage through the House of Representatives and the Senate.
The final version of the budget for fiscal year 2027 is expected to be approved in the fall, before the start of the new US fiscal year, which starts on October 1.
After the start of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, the United States gradually increased its military support for Kyiv. The main mechanism was the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), which has been in operation since 2016 and through which the Pentagon financed the training of the Ukrainian military, the purchase of equipment, communications equipment, radars, drones, and other weapons.
Before the full-scale Russian invasion, the total amount of American military aid to Ukraine was estimated at several billion dollars.
Since the start of the great war in February 2022, the volume of US aid to Ukraine has increased many times. Under the Joe Biden administration, the total volume of US military aid to Ukraine under various programs has exceeded $60 billion.
However, after Trump returned to the White House in 2025, Washington effectively stopped allocating new packages of free military aid, but continued to supply weapons under the already approved packages from the Biden era. At the insistence of Democrats, the US budgets for 2025 and 2026 managed to include meager amounts of aid to Ukraine, amounting to several hundred million dollars.
Thus, 2027 may be the first year since 2016 when the US will not provide direct, free military assistance to Ukraine.
