BW #63: Ukraine aid
President Joe Biden will likely sign a package of aid to Ukraine later today. Which countries have been helping Ukraine the most? Has that changed over time?
After months of political gridlock, the US Congress has passed a bill to give military aid to Ukraine. (For more info, see the article at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/senate-aid-package-ukraine-israel-taiwan.html?unlocked_article_code=1.m00.AbRq.AqTmyYdTaoFm&smid=url-share .) It's expected that President Joe Biden will sign it into law within the coming hours.
This comes after many months in which backers and friends of Ukraine begged the Republican-majority House of Representatives to authorize such funding. (The legislative package also authorized assistance for Israel and Taiwan, and put in place a mechanism to disconnect TikTok from its current China-based owner.) Numerous reports say that other countries (including many in Europe) have been helping Ukraine to defend itself from Russia, but that US aid was particularly important. (Is the allocated $60 billion enough? The NYT podcast, The Daily, asked this question in today's episode: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/podcasts/the-daily/is-60-billion-enough-to-save-ukraine.html )
I'm happy that this funding went through, and hope that it'll help Ukraine to stave off the Russian invasion to some degree. (It might also start to change the way that Congress works, now that the Speaker of the House, who is a Republican, cooperated with Democrats to get this done.) But I did start thinking about how much aid Ukraine has received, how much it needs, and what kinds of aid it has gotten from various countries.
This week, we'll thus look at a data set from February describing what aid Ukraine had received so far. We'll explore who has donated, what they have donated, and even where Ukrainian refugees have gone.
Data and seven questions
This week's data comes from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (http://www.ifw-kiel.de/), located in the northern German city of Kiel. Their Ukraine Support Tracker (https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/ukraine-support-tracker-data-20758/) looks at all of the country-to-country ("bilateral") support that Ukraine has received since Russia invaded in January 2022. This means that it ignores assistance provided by individuals and non-profits.
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The latest update to their data and reporting, published in February, is available from here:
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/ukraine-support-tracker-data-20758/
You can download the data itself, in Excel format, from here:
This week, I have seven tasks and questions for you, based on this data set. Learning goals include turning troublesome text into datetime columns, pivot tables, grouping with datetime data, sorting, and plotting.
- Turn the "Bilateral assistance, main data" tab from the Excel file into a data frame. Make sure the "Announcement Date" column is in datetime format, ignoring any rows where that column is missing or where the datetime isn't in YYYY-MM-DD format.
- Calculate how many rows in the data set describe each kind of specific assistance.
