On 30 April, in the Oval Office, US President Donald Trump said that Joe Biden gave Ukraine $350 billion, and that this is one of the reasons the war continues.
He has said this many times. He cannot tell anyone where the figure comes from, and his own officials have been unable to reproduce it when asked. It has been corrected so many times by so many fact-checkers that one more correction will not change anything. Yet here we are. Again.
The real story is that POTUS is using it to argue for a Russian market American business has already walked away from.
Because the inflated figure is not the real story. The real story is that POTUS is using it to argue for a Russian market American business has already, and decisively, walked away from.
The actual number, depending on what is counted, ranges from $114 billion (Kiel Institute, total US aid allocated through end-2024) to $188 billion (Council on Foreign Relations, total US appropriations through end-2025). Ukraine’s president said that his country received $98.5 billion.
Both halves of that argument are wrong.
The implicit case Trump is making, every time he repeats this figure, is that America gave too much to Ukraine and got too little, and that the real opportunity lies in normalizing relations with Russia. Both halves of that argument are wrong, and they are wrong in ways that anyone can verify in an afternoon.
The market that wasn’t
Begin with Russia. After three decades of attempted normalization—warm relations under Yeltsin, the “reset” under Obama, the cordial Trump-first-term posture, and a procession of summits, working groups, and energy memoranda along the way—the total US foreign direct investment position in Russia in 2021 stood at $12.3 billion.
Russia still ranked as the United States’ twenty-third-largest goods trading partner.
That is not a small number in absolute terms. But Russia still ranked as the United States’ twenty-third-largest goods trading partner. The Congressional Research Service report explaining why this is so is blunt: “Despite abundant natural resources, an educated labor force, and a large consumer base, a number of factors have contributed to a less-than-favorable business environment, including the role of the state in the economy, corruption, lack of regulatory transparency and property rights protection, and regional instability.”
A market in which the state can seize your assets at will, is not a market.
As if that weren’t enough, there are also other reasons why the economic relations between the two countries have been weak, and these structural problems will persist even if every sanction is lifted tomorrow. For example, American oil refineries cannot process the type of crude Russia produces. Besides, there are no gas pipelines between the two countries.
The “tremendous potential” Putin invoked at Anchorage in August has been invoked at every US-Russia summit since the Cold War. It has never materialized because the Russian state will not let it. A market in which the state can seize your assets at will, and has done so to ExxonMobil to the tune of $4.6 billion in 2022, is not a market.
The market that is
Yes, before the full-scale invasion, there was much more American capital in Russia than in Ukraine. No one will debate that.
American capital remained in Ukraine and is now expanding here.
But in 2022, the trajectories reversed. American capital pulled out of Russia under sanctions and expropriation. Yet American capital remained in Ukraine and is now expanding here. The American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine, founded in 1992, today represents over 600 member companies—American, international, and Ukrainian—who have collectively invested more than $50 billion in the country.
Ninety percent of those member companies remain fully operational after four years of full-scale invasion, and sixty-one percent plan to expand operations in 2026.
Eight months later, the US International Development Finance Corporation announced the fund’s first investment.
US-Ukraine trade reached $16.5 billion in 2024. On 30 April 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Ukraine’s First Deputy Prime Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko signed the United States–Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund.
Eight months later, the US International Development Finance Corporation announced the fund’s first investment—an equity stake in a Ukrainian drone-communications firm, with more than 200 applications already in the pipeline.
The Sakhalin tell
Anchorage made the case in miniature. On 15 August 2025, the day Trump and Putin posed there for cameras, Putin signed a decree opening Russia’s flagship oil project, Sakhalin-1, to returning foreign investors—aimed specifically at previously expropriated ExxonMobil.
The largest US oil company looked at Russia and declined.
The condition attached: returning foreign shareholders must work to lift Western sanctions. The bait could not have been more direct. Five weeks later, ExxonMobil’s CEO, Darren Woods, publicly said the company has no plans to return to Russia.
The largest US oil company, given an open invitation from the Russian president himself, looked at Russia and declined. Trump, looking at the same Russia, dreams of “tremendous potential.” Well, maybe—but a potential is nothing if it fails to materialize. The question writes itself: whose side is POTUS on?
Whose deal
The answer is uncomfortable. American business is already on one side—Ukraine, a country far from perfect yet increasingly integrated into European markets and governed by enforceable contracts. POTUS stands on the other side, with those whose interests in Russia are not the interests of the US Treasury or of the 600 American firms operating in Kyiv. It is a personal interest, dressed up as a national one.
The “tremendous potential” exists.
He is making the case for a deal. But it’s not America’s deal. It’s his personal one.
The $350 billion allegedly “wasted” on Ukraine is used to obscure the choice. The $50 billion invested here by real American companies is the choice itself. The “tremendous potential” exists. It is just not in the country POTUS keeps pointing to.
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