A group of eight Baltic and Nordic NATO states announced on Thursday that they were pooling together funds to pledge $500 million to the NATO scheme that funds US arms shipments to Ukraine, known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List, or PURL initiative.
According to numbers released by Ukraine earlier this month, the new package funded by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden brings the total in PURL funds pledged by NATO countries to about $3.3 billion. The initiative first began over the summer following a White House meeting between President Trump and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte.
The US started actually shipping weapons to Ukraine using the PURL funds in September. The US and NATO have not detailed the contents of each PURL package, but reports say it is primarily air defenses, including Patriot missile interceptors, missiles for the HIMARS rocket systems, and other types of munitions.
The Trump administration has also continued to ship weapons packages to Ukraine that were previously approved by the Biden administration and has approved several weapons sales for Ukraine, including one that’s partially funded by US military aid and will arm Ukrainian forces with long-range cruise missiles. US weapons shipments to Ukraine were reportedly slowed by the government shutdown, which just ended this week.
The news of the latest PURL funding comes as Ukraine is losing territory to advancing Russian forces in both eastern and southern Ukraine, and peace talks between the two sides remain stalled.
