The member countries of the Ukraine Defence Contact Group have already pledged $35 billion in military support to Ukraine this year, announced the British minister, John Healey, co-chair of the Contact Group, on Thursday 12 February.
“We have pledged additional military aid worth a total of $35 billion to Ukraine”, he highlighted at the end of the meeting.
By 2025, the Contact Group had raised some $45 billion in military aid for Ukraine. Germany alone has pledged 11.5 billion for 2026.
The co-chairs of the Contact Group set the example. John Healey announced that his country would be spending £500 million on air defence systems, including - for the first time - £150 million under the PURL initiative. £390 million will go towards the delivery of 1,000 additional British-made light multirole missiles. In the coming months, the UK will also deliver a further 1,200 air defence missiles and 200,000 artillery shells to the Ukrainian defence forces through the Air Defence Consortium (ADC).
The other co-chair of the Contact Group, German minister, Boris Pistorius, announced that Germany would provide five PAC3 missile interceptors, on condition that other countries provide 30. He added that this operation was well under way.
Mr Pistorius also explained that the previous day he and his foreign affairs colleague, Johann Wadephul, had relaunched the ‘Sustainable Action for Air Defence’ (EAP) initiative. In a letter, the ministers ask their partners to support Ukraine more intensively and to look into their stocks of equipment that they could transfer to Kyiv. “If there is nothing left in the stocks that can be supplied to Ukraine, we will have to provide money, as we did last year. We reached €1 billion last year for the acquisition of more autonomous air defence systems for Ukraine”, said Mr Pistorius.
NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, also announced that “the Allies have announced an additional contribution of several hundred million dollars for the PURL initiative”, thanking the United Kingdom, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Lithuania for their contributions. He pointed out that the United States could supply Ukraine with essential equipment in 2026 “worth $12 to 15 billion, equipment that only the United States is capable of supplying on such a scale”.
For his part, Dutch minister, Ruben Brekelmans, revealed that the Netherlands would be sending F16 simulators so that Ukrainian pilots could train as much as possible on a simulator rather than in the air, pointing out that the F16s were mainly used for air defence and that the Ukrainians needed to be able to use them as effectively as possible.
Despite these announcements, Mark Rutte called for even more to be done: “Ukraine needs our support now more than ever. We urge all nations to lend their support and share the burden”, he pleaded.
“We are more united and determined than ever. We will be stepping up our military aid to Ukraine. We are going to increase the pressure on Russia and we want to make 2026 the year this war ends, the year we establish peace”, promised John Healey. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)