“Half of all Ukrainian aid was laundered and sent back to Democrat candidates for re-election.”

Conspiracy theories about U.S. aid to Ukraine have been commonplace since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and some social media users have claimed that U.S. funding is being diverted to fund Democrats’ political campaigns. 

In an Instagram video, conservative pundit Jeremy Herrell said a former Polish minister said “nearly half of all the money that we sent to Ukraine was siphoned off and sent back to the Democrat Party and their candidates.” 

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Herrell in the video said the Polish official’s claims may not be true, but added “I 100% believe that that’s what’s happening.” 

Text on the video also said: “Half of all Ukrainian aid was laundered and sent back to Democrat candidates for re-election.”

Herrell’s telling misrepresents what a former Polish minister was reported as saying about Ukraine aid, according to reporting from Russian state news network RT. The claims the Polish minister made also lack evidence. RT is a key piece of “Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem,” according to the U.S. State Department. 

RT reported on Nov. 22 that Piotr Kulpa, a former deputy labor minister in Poland, told a Ukrainian journalist that officials in Ukraine were embezzling large sums of aid money. RT said Kulpa supported president-elect Donald Trump.

PolitiFact was unable to find the original interview that RT mentioned. 

Kulpa also said in the interview, according to RT, that aid programs are used to “write off large sums of money that finance shady systems under the Democratic Party’s control.” But based on what RT reported, Kulpa did not say half of the funding dedicated to Ukraine aid was rerouted to Democratic political campaigns.

Kulpa said, according to RT, that Ukrainian officials stole “30% to 50%” of Ukraine aid. The RT report does not say that Kulpa provided evidence to back this claim.

We’ve found no evidence for that, either. Congress has appropriated about $180 billion in aid to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to the Special Inspector General for Operation Atlantic Resolve. Most of that aid has gone to Ukraine; some has gone to other allied countries. 

The U.S. government oversees the equipment it sends to Ukraine and has a certification process to ensure weapons are not diverted, experts told PolitiFact in a previous fact-check. The economic aid is routed through the World Bank, while the humanitarian aid is being sent to nongovernmental aid groups.

More than half of the aid to Ukraine has been weapon and military equipment shipments rather than direct financial payments, reported the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank.

The U.S. State Department said in August “there remains no credible evidence of illicit diversion of U.S.-provided defense equipment, direct budget support, or humanitarian assistance from Ukraine,” according to a November report from the inspectors general of the State and Defense departments and the Agency for International Development.

The Ukraine Fraud and Corruption Investigative Working Group — a project involving multiple U.S. government agencies to investigate allegations of fraud and corruption related to Ukraine aid — has opened 61 investigations and closed 30 of them from July to September 2024.

Our ruling

An Instagram post claimed, “Half of all Ukrainian aid was laundered and sent back to Democrat candidates for re-election.”

There’s no evidence for that. The conservative commentator making this claim did not accurately describe what a former Polish minister claimed about misuse of Ukraine aid. Neither of them offered evidence, in any case. 

We rate the claim False.