Trump’s 90-Day Foreign Aid Freeze Won’t Apply to Ukraine Military Funding, Pentagon Assures VOA

A US Department of Defense official on Thursday confirmed to Ukraine’s Voice of America that the new 90-day foreign-aid freeze does not apply to military support for Kyiv. The moratorium instituted by President Donald Trump on his first day in office only applies to non-military spending such as economic support, funds for rebuilding and for humanitarian aid.

“Security assistance to Ukraine is not limited by the recent foreign aid decree, as it applies only to development programs, not military support,” the Pentagon official told a Voice of America correspondent.

The VOA correspondent, Ostap Yarysh, also calmed some local fears that all Pentagon staff dedicated to Ukraine had turned over with the new administration. Aside from some new promotions or other shifting around (he singled out Laura Cooper, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, who has been in charge of Ukraine and Russia before), here were no mass firings to his knowledge.

“I’ll say for myself - I was there literally yesterday and saw at least a few people working with the Ukrainian direction in their seats,” Yarysh wrote on Facebook.

While the wording in Trump’s decree was fairly straightforward, it left some room for rumors and misinformation to circulate in Ukraine, and in some press reports.

The Ukrainian State Disinformation Countering Center had put out a release on Tuesday stating, “Ukraine receives assistance from the United States under the Presidential Drawdown (PDA), Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI), and Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programs. The executive order does not apply to these programs,” the center stated.

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Trump’s presidential order did not, however, specify exactly which programs will be affected. For example, Politico noted, entities such as Ukraine’s US Agency for International Development reconstruction programs seem to be in limbo.

“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values.  They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries,” the wording of the order reads.