2bn

Ukraine says it will need $120bn in defence funding in 2026 to stave off Russia’s more than three-year war.

Germany has pledged more than $2bn in military aid for Ukraine, as the government in Kyiv signalled that it would need $120bn in 2026 to stave off Russia’s nearly four-year all-out war.

Speaking on Wednesday at a Ukraine Defence Contact Group meeting in Brussels, German Foreign Minister Boris Pistorius said that Western allies must maintain their resolve and provide more weapons to Ukraine.

“You can count on Germany. We will continue and expand our support for Ukraine. With new contracts, Germany will provide additional support amounting to over 2 billion euros [$2.3bn],” Pistorius told the meeting in Brussels, which was also attended by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Ukrainian Defence Minister Denys Shmyhal.

“The package addresses a number of urgent requirements of Ukraine. It provides air defence systems, Patriot interceptors, radar systems and precision guided artillery, rockets and ammunition,” Pistorius said, adding that Germany will also deliver two additional IRIS-T air defence systems to Ukraine, including a large number of guided missiles and shoulder-fired air defence missiles.

In recent months, the transatlantic alliance started to coordinate regular deliveries of large weapons packages to Ukraine to help fend off Russia’s war.

Spare weapons stocks in European arsenals have all but dried up, and only the United States has a sufficient store of ready weapons that Ukraine most needs.

Under the financial arrangement – known as the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) – European allies and Canada are buying US weapons to help Kyiv keep Russian forces at bay. About $2bn worth had previously been allocated since August.

Germany’s pledge came as Ukraine’s Western backers gathered to drum up more military support for their beleaguered partner.

Shmyhal put his country’s defence needs next year at $120bn. “Ukraine will cover half, $60bn, from our national resources. We are asking partners to join us in covering the other half,” he said.

Air defence systems are most in need. Shmyhal said that last month alone, Russia “launched over 5,600 strike drones and more than 180 missiles targeting our civilian infrastructure and people”.

The new pledges of support came a day after new data showed that foreign military aid to Ukraine had declined sharply recently. Despite the PURL programme, support plunged by 43 percent in July and August compared to the first half of the year, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute, which tracks such deliveries and funding.

Hegseth said that “all countries need to translate goals into guns, commitments into capabilities and pledges into power. That’s all that matters. Hard power. It’s the only thing belligerents actually respect.”

The administration of US President Donald Trump hasn’t donated military equipment to Ukraine. It has been weighing whether to send Tomahawk long-range missiles if Russia doesn’t wind down its war soon, but it remains unclear who will pay for those weapons, should they be approved.

Development financing to Southeast Asia is expected to fall by more than $2bn in 2026 due to recent cutbacks by Western governments, according to a major Australian think tank.

The Sydney-based Lowy Institute predicted in a new report on Sunday that development assistance to Southeast Asia will drop to $26.5bn next year from $29bn in 2023.

The figures are billions of dollars below the pre-pandemic average of $33bn.

Bilateral funding is also expected to fall by 20 percent from about $11bn in 2023 to $9bn in 2026, the report said.

The cuts will hit poorer countries in the regions hardest, and “social sector priorities such as health, education, and civil society support that rely on bilateral aid funding are likely to lose out the most”, the report said.

Fewer alternatives

Cuts by Europe and the United Kingdom have been made to redirect funds as NATO members plan to raise defence spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the shadow of Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The European Union and seven European governments will cut foreign aid by $17.2bn between 2025 and 2029, while this year, the UK announced it will cut foreign aid spending by $7.6bn annually, the report said.

The greatest upset has come from the United States, where earlier this year, President Donald Trump shut down the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and slashed nearly $60bn in foreign assistance. More recently, the US Senate took steps to claw back another $8bn in spending.

The Lowy Institute said governments closer to home, like China, will play an increasingly important role in the development landscape.

“The centre of gravity in Southeast Asia’s development finance landscape looks set to drift East, notably to Beijing but also Tokyo and Seoul,” the report said. “Combined with potentially weakening trade ties with the United States, Southeast Asian countries risk finding themselves with fewer alternatives to support their development.”

After experiencing a sharp decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese overseas development assistance has started to bounce back, reaching $4.9bn in 2023, according to the report.

Its spending, however, focuses more on infrastructure projects, like railways and ports, rather than social sector issues, the report said. Beijing’s preference for non-concessional loans given at commercial rates benefits Southeast Asia’s middle- and high-income countries, but is less helpful for its poorest, like Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and East Timor.

As China and institutions like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank play a more prominent role in Southeast Asia, less clear is how Japan and South Korea can fill in the blanks, according to experts.

Japan, South Korea

Grace Stanhope, a Lowy Institute research associate and one of the report’s authors, told Al Jazeera that both countries have expanded their development assistance to include civil society projects.

“[While] Japanese and Korean development support is often less overtly ‘values-based’ than traditional Western aid, we’ve been seeing Japan especially move into the governance and civil society sectors, with projects in 2023 that are explicitly focused on democracy and protection of vulnerable migrants, for example,” she said.

“The same is true of [South] Korea, which has recently supported projects for improving the transparency of Vietnamese courts and protection of women from gender-based violence, so the approach of the Japanese and Korean development programmes is evolving beyond just infrastructure.”

Tokyo and Seoul, however, are facing similar pressures as Europe from the Trump administration to increase their defence budgets, cutting into their development assistance.

Shiga Hiroaki, a professor at the Graduate School of International Social Sciences at Yokohama National University, said he was more “pessimistic” that Japan could step in to fill the gaps left by the West.

He said cuts could even be made as Tokyo ramps up defence spending to a historic high, and a “Japanese-first” right-wing party pressures the government to redirect funds back home.

“Considering Japan’s huge fiscal deficit and public opposition to tax increases, it is highly likely that the aid budget will be sacrificed to fund defence spending,” he said.

Day before his government’s publication of a defence strategy review, PM Keir Starmer says he will ‘restore Britain’s war-fighting readiness’.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer has warned the United Kingdom must be prepared to confront and defeat hostile states with modern military capabilities, as his government unveils a 1.5-billion-pound (about $2bn) plan to build at least six new weapons and explosives factories.

“We are being directly threatened by states with advanced military forces, so we must be ready to fight and win,” Starmer wrote in The Sun newspaper on Sunday. “We will restore Britain’s war-fighting readiness as the central purpose of our armed forces.”

The announcement came in advance of a Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which Starmer is set to publish on Monday. The review will assess threats facing the UK amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and pressure from United States President Donald Trump for NATO allies to bolster their defences.

European nations have rushed to strengthen their armed forces in recent months, following Trump’s comments that Europe must shoulder more responsibility for its security.

Defence Secretary John Healey, speaking to the BBC network, said the planned investment signals a clear warning to Moscow and would also help revive the UK’s sluggish economy.

“We are in a world that is changing now … and it is a world of growing threats,” Healey told the BBC on Sunday. “It’s growing Russian aggression. It’s those daily cyberattacks, it’s new nuclear risks, and it’s increasing tension in other parts of the world as well.”

The UK’s Ministry of Defence confirmed the funds would support the domestic production of up to 7,000 long-range missiles. With this package, its total munitions spending will reach approximately 6 billion pounds (nearly $8bn) during the current parliamentary term.

Meanwhile, The Sunday Times reported that the government is eyeing US-built jets capable of launching tactical nuclear weapons, although the UK’s Defence Ministry has yet to comment.

The forthcoming SDR, ordered after the Labour Party’s election win in July 2024, will outline emerging threats and the military capabilities required to address them. Starmer has pledged to raise defence spending to 2.5 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) by 2027, with an eventual aim of reaching 3 percent.

The arms initiative follows earlier government pledges to invest 1 billion pounds ($1.3bn) in artificial intelligence technology for battlefield decision-making and an additional 1.5 billion pounds (about $2bn) to improve housing conditions for armed forces personnel.