Fact check: Trump repeats false Ukraine aid figure while sitting with Zelensky

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump made some false claims to the press while meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House on Monday, including a long-debunked claim that the US has given Ukraine more than $300 billion in wartime aid.

“I guess the number is well over $300 billion,” Trump said at one point in his televised remarks. At another, he said, “Under Biden, it was just crazy what was going on. I believe the number is over $300 (billion). I think it could be $350 billion worth of equipment and money and everything else.”

Those figures aren’t close to correct, as numerous fact checks have pointed out.

According to figures from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German think tank that tracks the aid data, the US allocated about $134 billion to Ukraine in military, financial and humanitarian aid to Ukraine from late January 2022 through June 2025 (these figures are at Monday exchange rates), almost all of the $139 billion the US committed to Ukraine over that period.

It’s possible to arrive at different numbers using different methods of counting aid, but no reasonable method has corroborated Trump’s “$300 billion” or “$350 billion” figures. The US government inspector general overseeing the Ukraine response says on its website that the US appropriated about $185 billion for the Ukraine response through March 2025 — including about $90 billion actually disbursed — but that included funding spent in the US for weapons and defense services or sent to countries other than Ukraine.

When CNN asked the White House last week for comment on the president’s claim that week that the US had given Ukraine $350 billion, a Trump official, responding on condition of anonymity, cited the inspector general’s figure in the vicinity of $185 billion. The official also noted that the inspector general’s website has pointed out the US also provided about $20 billion in loans as part of a G7 initiative.

That’s all fair, but it doesn’t get close to Trump’s own $350 billion figure. So how did the White House official try to get closer?

With some nonsensical math that added in a whole bunch of things that are not assistance to Ukraine.

Specifically, the official counted more than $90 billion in inflation felt by US households after the Russian invasion of Ukraine; a $16 billion decline in US exports to Russia amid US sanctions; and more than $7 billion in increased fertilizer costs after the Russian invasion drove up prices.

It’s obvious that none of this actually supports Trump’s claim that the US has provided Ukraine with $350 billion in aid. It’s particularly absurd to count the inflation experienced by Americans as US assistance to Ukraine.

False claims about mail-in ballots

A reporter also asked Trump about mail-in ballots in the wake of a Monday morning social media post in which Trump said he wants to try to “get rid of” them. Though Trump responded that the question was off-topic given Zelensky’s presence, he also repeated some false claims about these ballots.

Other countries and mail-in ballots: Trump said in the social media post, “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting.” He repeated the claim more cautiously out loud, saying, “Do you know that we’re the only country in the world — I believe, I may be wrong — but just about the only country in the world that uses it.”

He is wrong. Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, as CNN and others have pointed out when Trump has made such claims before. These countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Switzerland.

The legitimacy of mail-in ballots: Trump called mail-in ballots “corrupt” and said “you can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots.”

There is no basis for these claims. Mail-in voting is a legitimate method used by legitimate voters to cast legitimate ballots. Elections experts say the incidence of fraud tends to be marginally higher with mail-in ballots than with in-person ballots — but also that fraud rates in federal elections are tiny even with mail-in ballots.

Republican-dominated Utah is among the states where voters are automatically sent mail-in ballots (though it is now phasing out that policy); its elections, like those of other states, have been free of widespread fraud. Mail-in ballots have been used in the US all the way back to the Civil War. And it’s worth noting that Trump himself encouraged supporters to vote by mail in 2024.

“Our elections are more secure, transparent, and verified than ever before in American history, thanks to the thousands of professional election officials of both parties, at the state and local level, that oversee them,” David Becker, founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit, said in a Monday message to CNN.

Jimmy Carter and mail-in ballots: Trump invoked a commission that was co-chaired by late Democratic president Jimmy Carter in the 2000s as support for his claims about mail-in ballots, saying, “Even Jimmy Carter, with his commission, they set it up. He said, ‘The one thing about mail-in voting: you will never have an honest election if you have mail-in.’”

Neither Carter nor his commission said that, as CNN and others have previously noted.

It’s true that the commission Carter co-chaired was generally skeptical of mail-in ballots: it said that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and are “vulnerable to abuse in several ways.”

But it did not say an honest election was impossible with the use of these ballots. In fact, it highlighted an example of successful mail-only elections, saying that Oregon, a state that has been conducting elections exclusively by mail-in voting since the late 1990s, “appears to have avoided significant fraud in its vote-by-mail elections by introducing safeguards to protect ballot integrity, including signature verification.” The report also offered some recommendations for making the use of mail-in ballots more secure and called for “further research on the pros and cons” of voting by mail (as well as early voting).

Fifteen years after the release of the report, Carter said in a 2020 statement: “I approve the use of absentee ballots and have been using them for more than five years.” His organization, the Carter Center, said in a 2020 statement: “Fortunately, since 2005, many states have gained substantial experience in vote-by-mail and have shown how key concerns can be effectively addressed through appropriate planning, resources, training, and messaging.”

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