France has run out of money to meet its promised military aid to Ukraine. Due to its budget deficit, France will fall short of its initial planned military assistance to Ukraine and will not reach the €3bn mark as promised, the country's Defence Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on October 15, adding that the figure will exceed €2bn.

"Politically it was decided at the beginning of 2024 that this aid could reach €3bn. In reality, we will be above €2bn but not at €3bn,” Lecornu said.

France’s budget is in bad shape. The deficit will hit 6% of GDP leaving the government scrambling to save money and reduce its deficit at a time when the economy is slipping into recession.

Overall, Paris provided €1.7bn worth of military aid to Kyiv in 2022 and €2.1bn in 2023; that puts it behind countries such as Germany, the UK and Sweden, Politico reports.

France’s financial shortfall follows on from Germany, which also ran out of money in August due to its own budget crisis. Berlin has cut this year’s allocation for Ukraine in half to €4bn and says that it will reduce it to €500mn for the two years following that. It has frozen all additional military aid to Ukraine due to budget constraints after a decision by the constitutional court on the so-called “Schuldenbremse”, or debt break, blew a €60bn hole in the Federal budget. However, when German Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Zelenskiy last week in Berlin he did announce an additional €1.4bn weapons package in addition to the slated €4bn for this year.

Germany has very tight restrictions on federal government borrowing that can only be relaxed in “times of crisis.” The supreme court ruled that the war in Ukraine was not a time of crisis for Germany. German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck also admitted last week that the economy will miss its 0.3% growth target this year and will most likely slip into a second year of recession in 2024, contracting by 0.2% instead. Russia’s economy, by contrast, is flourishing and is expected to grow by 2.6% this year or more, although the outlook for 2025 looks much worse, according to a pessimistic medium-term macroeconomic outlook issued by the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) over the summer.

Funds from the US are also drying up. The US ran out of money for Ukraine entirely at the start of this year leading to a catastrophic shortfall in weapons supplies in the spring. Russia launched a missile barrage in January that depleted Ukraine’s air defence ammunition, then followed up with another major barrage in March when the skies were open and began to systematically destroy Ukraine entire non-nuclear power generating facilities.

The face of Ukraine’s looming defeat, Congress finally rushed through a $61bn aid package on April 20 but disbursements from this fund have been reportedly tardy.

Mike Johnson said there is “no appetite” to provide Ukraine with more funds and if Donald Trump wins the US presidential election on November 5 he is likely to lobby for bringing the war to an immediate end.

While in Washington during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meetings US President Joe Biden granted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy a new $8bn aid package, but two thirds of this was an earlier approved presidential grant that had been caught up in procedural approval in Congress. Of the other third, a large part was not actual weapons, but a facility for Ukraine to order new weapons like Patriot missiles from US manufacturers.

The G7 $50bn loan to Ukraine, approved on June 13 at a G7 summit in Italy, has also got bogged down in wrangling. The US is refusing to approve its share of up to $20bn unless the EU increases its review period of the loan from six months to three years.

In the meantime, the EU has promised to provide its €35bn share of this loan earlier, but that too has been stymied by a Hungarian veto. The EU is currently trying to find a work around and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban suggested last week that he may lift his objections. The EU loan was last week approved by EU finance ministers, but it still has to clear an approval process by the full EU parliament and the Council of Ministers before it can be released – maybe before the end of the year.

Ukraine received some $14.6bn from its allies over the summer, but only a mere $10mn in September according to Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance. Currently, Ukraine is running a $3.5bn monthly deficit that is almost entirely funded by its international partners.

The Ministry of Finance (MinFin) has been anticipating falling support and the budget predicts that the international aid will fall from some $36bn this year to $19 by 2016. The Rada is currently preparing various tax hikes, including increasing the war levy from 1% to 5% and hiking the tax on back profits from 25% to 50%, to generate more revenues.