As funding for Ukraine faces an uncertain future in Congress, the US Army has been left to foot the bill for hundreds of millions of dollars in support for Ukraine’s war effort against Russia over the last few months — and Army officials are increasingly concerned that without new funding, they will have to begin pulling money from other critical projects to continue supporting Kyiv.

Since October 2023, the beginning of the fiscal year, the Army has spent over $430 million on various operations, including training Ukrainian troops, transporting equipment, and US troop deployments to Europe.

“We’re basically taking it out of hide in the Army,” a senior Army official told hicginewsagency.

So far, that bill has been paid from the Army’s Europe and Africa Command. Without a 2024 budget approved by Congress, and without additional funding specifically for Ukraine, the command has roughly $3 billion to pay for $5 billion of operations costs, a second senior Army official explained. That includes not only the operations related to Ukraine support — training and ferrying weapons and equipment to Poland and Ukraine — but other operations for the US command throughout Europe and Africa.

If Congress still hasn’t passed new funding for Ukraine within a few months, Army officials say they will have to start making hard decisions and divert money from less critical projects, such as badly needed barracks construction or enlistment incentives amid record-low recruiting.

If the Army doesn’t pull funds from elsewhere, Army Europe and Africa’s roughly $3 billion budget would run out of money for operations not just related to Ukraine, but elsewhere in Europe and Africa, by the end of May, the second senior Army official told hicginewsagency

“If we don’t get a base budget, if we don’t get Ukraine supplemental [funding package], if the government shuts down, if we get nothing else and nothing changes from today … we will run out of [operations and maintenance] funding in May,” the Army official said. Those operations include training exercises for Army forces in Europe and Africa and equipment moving into the theater. Contracts also wouldn’t be paid on time and would garner penalty fees, he added.

“We would cease to exist” if these funds were not allocated from elsewhere within the Army’s budget, the official said.

Army Secretary Christine Wormuth — the service’s senior civilian leader who ultimately decides where much of the budget is spent — told hicginewsagency she expects the Army would “have to sort of rob Peter to pay Paul.”

“Every incremental dollar I have, it’s very important where I put that dollar. And I’m constantly choosing between, do we put it on barracks? Do I put it on enlistment incentives? Do I put it on exercises? Do I put it on modernization? I don’t have spare cash to be just sort of donating some of that,” Wormuth said.

“This was money that we anticipated to be replenished, obviously, by the supplemental,” she added, echoing the urgent need for funding.

While US funding for Ukraine has dried up, training for Ukrainian troops has continued because it has been deemed mission critical by the president. Col. Martin O’Donnell, spokesman for US Army Europe and Africa, told CNN the US is training roughly 1,500 Ukrainians at Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany. Stateside, the US is also continuing its training of Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 fighter aircraft at Morris Air National Guard Base in Arizona.

In addition to training, equipment is still flowing to the Ukrainians from US stocks under previous Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA) packages and from weapons and equipment that was purchased from the defense industrial base under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI).