According to Bloomberg, the EU will review its foreign aid, shifting several billion euros to better align the bloc’s funding allocation “with its foreign policy interests in difficult international circumstances.” The decision was made due to the bloc’s growing defense priority amid Russia’s third year of aggression against Ukraine and US President Donald Trump’s less-than-favorable stance toward the bloc during his first weeks in office. The European Commission’s plan coincides with Trump’s decision to disband USAID, which annually distributed tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid.
Kyiv is looking for alternative sources of funding, but the suspension of US aid has already begun to affect the pace of the investigation and documentation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine, as the US had previously funded six projects from the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office for a total of $89M. Funding for at least five of them has been frozen.
As reported by Serhiy Sukhomlyn, head of the Recovery Agency, USAID’s funding suspension also led to the postponement of planned modernization at nine border checkpoints.