There is a certain elegance to the war in Ukraine. Ukraine takes all the generous aid, buys Western goods it never managed to produce at home, and keeps fighting with the money and weapons the West sends. Russian elites, meanwhile, work with large capital they manage in the United States: they invest it there and inflate their wealth, then use both the original capital and the war’s secondary effects to buy Western goods they, too, had never managed to produce at home. Everyone involved complains that the other side is uniquely corrupt, uniquely incompetent, or uniquely aggressive. The money keeps moving in circles because capital is not interested in borders and a million men dead.

Grants, Procurement, and the Art of the Recycle

In February 2025 Zelensky noted that Ukraine had received roughly $75–76 billion of the larger sum the United States had appropriated in connection with the war. The remark launched the now familiar hunt for the “missing” hundred billion. The Center for Strategic and International Studies and successive inspectors general observed that most of the money never left American hands: weapons production, replacement stocks, training, intelligence, and the cost of parking extra American forces in Europe. Roughly 60 percent of the overall package is spent in the United States.


What does reach Kyiv as cash is large enough to keep the lights on and the war going. Kyiv School of Economics digests show grants covering 15–23 percent of state budget revenues in recent periods—enough to plug the bulk of the financing gap once domestic tax revenue is exhausted. Defense and security have absorbed 40 percent or more of GDP. Without the grants, the hole is enormous. This is wartime arithmetic, but it is also a reliable, recurring order book for Western producers and manufacturers who know the invoices will be paid.

Inside Ukraine the leakage is real, even if not necessarily on the scale of the loudest estimates. New York Times reporting on unpublished audits found roughly $1.2 billion lost in 2024 alone to fraud, waste, and mismanagement in defense procurement—contracts continuing to firms already under investigation, systematic overpayments, and defective munitions that never reached the front. Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau NABU has pursued cases with cumulative estimated damages in the billions since 2022. Nor is there any shortage of undeniable schemes in the energy sector, where associates of the current leadership are implicated. Broader analyst judgments that 15–30 percent of total aid leaks away inside Ukraine remain rather vague claims.

Some of the money circles back through private hands as well. Spain’s notaries recorded roughly 14,400 home purchases by Ukrainian citizens between 2022 and 2025, worth an estimated €1.8–1.9 billion. Over the same period, Spain pledged around €2.5 billion in aid to Ukraine. Many of the buyers are Ukrainians who now live in Spain, but the symmetry is hard to miss: Madrid, too, sends aid east, and Ukrainian capital comes back, as it were, to buy Spanish property. France runs an even tighter loop. Through a €200 million support fund, Paris reimburses Kyiv for weapons it buys from French companies: Ukraine pays, presents the invoice, and gets its money back, as it did for 11,000 155mm shells and spare parts from Nexter and an air-defence radar from Thales. The money leaves Paris, passes through Kyiv, and lands in French order books. The industry is growing accordingly: one munitions plant in the Loiret is set to go from 20,000 rounds in 2023 to more than 80,000 in 2026, KNDS has opened a Ukrainian subsidiary, and Thales has signed a joint venture with Ukrainian partners.

Germany and the broader European Union have joined the circle with particular enthusiasm. At the February 2026 Munich Security Conference, Ukrainian private defense manufacturers signed a series of joint ventures with German partners — most prominently Munich-area startups and established drone firms — to produce reconnaissance UAVs, AI-guided strike systems, and unmanned ground vehicles on German soil. Production lines across Munich’s wider commuter belt have since begun turning out thousands of battle-tested Ukrainian designs, financed in large part by German and EU funds under initiatives like “Build with Ukraine.”

The arrangement is presented as industrial solidarity and technological transfer. In practice it functions as a reliable order book: Ukrainian wartime experience and designs are scaled with German and French manufacturing capacity and taxpayer money, then delivered back to the front. Munich’s defense-tech cluster expands, German and French factories stay busy. The underlying dependence remains; the circle simply acquires a Bavarian accent.

Russian Capital Flight as National Sport

Russian elite capital has treated Western markets as an offshore vault for decades. Cumulative private-sector outflows under Putin have been estimated in the hundreds of billions to well over a trillion dollars. Abramovich’s use of Concord Management to place multi-billion-dollar sums into major US hedge funds is one well-documented example; the assets were later frozen and the adviser faced regulatory action. When Elon Musk’s X platform company disclosed its investors in autumn 2026, an 8VC fund appeared on the list — the fund where sons of Russian billionaires are, or have been, on staff.

What followed was pressure-driven movement in both directions. Early post-2022 reporting described Russian rich folks bringing assets on the order of $50 billion back or redomiciling companies as Western services tightened. Later reporting shows additional tens of billions moving outward again via crypto, gold, and Gulf real estate as domestic seizure risk rose. The pattern is not a sophisticated extraction scheme running through American fund positions. It is a political-economic system that has failed to convert territory, resources, and human capital into broad prosperity at home, so capital seeks exit — or is yanked back by political means. Even the Russian money that stays frozen in Europe ends up in the circle: in 2024 the EU arranged for €300 million in proceeds from immobilised Russian assets to fund rapid purchases from French industry, which the French defence ministry welcomed as a chance “to keep ramping up production.” Another €195 million followed in 2025 for shells and glide bombs. Interest from the same assets now pays KNDS to maintain the French Caesar guns in Ukraine.

Russia’s population is approximately 143–144 million on the world’s largest landmass. Density is low. Building high-tech cities in the snow is not a matter of simply applying modern technology; it requires capital allocation, rule of law, human capital, and political choices that successive Russian governments have not made. The land is vast, the conversion of that land into a high-income innovative economy has never truly occurred. Chinese industrialization took place under different institutional and demographic conditions. Russian resource rents and oligarchic concentration have produced a different result: pockets of wealth, a defense-industrial base that wartime pressure has now made capable, and persistent capital flight or forced return, because far more money can apparently still be made abroad than in Russia.

The Circle Closes

Boris Johnson’s April 2022 Ukraine visit is cited by several as the moment Western encouragement to fight on hardened Kyiv’s position. Johnson has called the sabotage narrative Russian propaganda. Zelensky has dismissed it as illogical. Detailed accounts show the parties had not resolved territorial questions or the precise shape of post-war security guarantees; Western states were reluctant to underwrite the latter. Western leaders preferred continued Ukrainian resistance to an early settlement on the terms Moscow was offering—and the war went on, as did the fiscal-economic stimulus circle.

The longer background is the post-2014 Donbas conflict. After Maidan, Russian-backed separatists declared independence in the Eastern regions; Ukrainian forces fought to reassert control. The hybrid character of the fighting is documented. At the same time, the 2014–2021 fighting was brutal, the political settlement never stuck, and oligarchic interests, particularly on the Ukrainian side, made any agreement harder to reach. Both governments have reasons to prefer the version in which the other side started the conflict.

The money, meanwhile, keeps circulating. Western taxpayers fund Ukrainian purchases of Western goods. Russian elites recycle Western-placed capital into further Western purchases, skirting the many sanctions imposed on them through third countries. So far, neither side has really built an industrial and technological base of its own that would make the circle unnecessary. The war supplies the justification, the endless circle supplies the customers.

Global capital streams do not know borders, and they do not care about a million dead people, or more, in a war. Western capital and economic power—including that of its conductors—must keep multiplying at all costs, even if through cold-blooded mass murder.

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