The €70 Billion Baseline
Publication date: 22 July 2026 · Research cut-off date: 3 August 2026 · Legal cut-off date: 17 July 2026
On 8 July 2026 the Heads of State and Government of the Alliance, meeting in Ankara, pledged €70 billion in military equipment, assistance and training for Ukraine for 2026 and affirmed sovereign commitments to sustaining at least equivalent levels in 2027. The figure sits on top of two magnitudes already fixed in the record. The first is the Alliance’s own predecessor baseline: at the 2024 Washington Summit Allies agreed a minimum of €40 billion for that year and delivered more than €50 billion, almost 60 per cent of it from European Allies and Canada. The second is the European Union’s Ukraine Support Loan, which provides up to €90 billion across 2026 and 2027, of which an indicative €60 billion is directed at Ukraine’s defence industrial capacities, and under which the Council made €45 billion available for 2026 — €16.7 billion in budget support and €28.3 billion in defence industrial capacity support. The structural constraint is that the three figures are not additive: NATO’s Deputy Secretary General told the European Parliament on 15 July 2026 that the loan is “a part of the commitment” expressed in the declaration. What the Ankara number contains, how much of it is additional, and which parts of it can become contractable industrial demand rather than transfers from stock, training activity or political signalling, remains unresolved on the disclosed record.
The first section reconstructs the institutional architecture from paragraph 4 of the Ankara Summit Declaration, the transcript of the Deputy Secretary General’s remarks to the European Parliament’s Committee on Security and Defence, and NATO’s own account of the Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List, NSATU, the Comprehensive Assistance Package and JATEC. The second sets out a six-part counting discipline and applies it to the legal instruments: Regulation (EU) 2026/467 and Regulation (EU) 2026/468, Council Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/919, Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/815 on procurement derogations, the European Peace Facility, SAFE, the European Defence Industry Programme and its Ukraine Support Instrument, and the training missions EUMAM Ukraine, Operation Interflex and Operation UNIFIER. The third examines the industrial map disclosed by national packages from the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Latvia and Canada, alongside the Kiel Institute’s allocation data. The fourth sets out what the reconstruction implies for public authorities, corporate strategy and capital providers. The report does not estimate the value of contracts that will follow from the pledge, does not allocate the €70 billion among suppliers or capability lines, does not assess any company, and does not construct a consolidated ledger of Allied support: no such ledger exists in the public domain, and the purpose here is to specify why one is difficult to build rather than to substitute for it.
