‘Donald Trump’s USAID Freeze Is Already Hurting Ukraine and Will Come Back to Bite America Later’

When Lesia Kondratiuk found out that US foreign aid funding to her organisation was being frozen, the news came almost without warning. It was the last Sunday in January and her organisation, an NGO startup that helps Ukraine’s blind citizens with issues like accessibility and using technology, had been expecting to receive another tranche of USAID funding within weeks.

Instead, she received a letter from the US Agency for International Development with a stop work order, advising her not to expect the payment or potentially any more in the future. The notice left her reeling. The next day, at a birthday party for her nephew, she recalls being unable to join in the celebrations, consumed by panic, and with the question, “What should I do? What should I do now?”.

Before 2022 there were estimated to be around 52,000 of blind or partially-sighted people in Ukraine. This estimate has increased significantly since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, and many of those Lesia’s organisation supports are veterans of the war. Since its founding in 2020 with a $25,000 USAID grant, Practice for Innovation Experience, or PIE, has focussed primarily on teaching people who cannot see to use laptops and smartphones so that they can still undertake work, and on mental health support.

“It really takes a lot of time, nearly one or two years, for a person to learn how to live without sight” she reveals, “and some never do.” In addition to working with educators and psychologists, PIE has spent much of the last four years developing and donating sound beacons that help their users find locations and services like bus stops, post offices and park benches. It’s important work in a former Soviet country where infrastructure for accessibility still leaves much to be desired, particularly in comparison to the standards of Western Europe.

“For the Soviet Union, no people with disabilities existed at all, they were trying to hide these people” Lesia explains. “The accessibility situation was really very bad. For the first ten years, many people didn’t even know about people in wheelchairs or blind people because they did not exist for them.”

It was only in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine declared its independence that issues like accessibility and civil rights began to come to the fore. Since then, USAID has been instrumental in facilitating progress on these kinds of issues, and in the slow but certain transformation of Ukraine into a modern liberal democracy. Over three decades between 1992 and 2022, it channeled $3 billion into the country, providing seminal funding to civil society organisations pushing for the advancement of human and civil rights, democracy and the rule of law.

It took two revolutions, 2004’s Orange Revolution and the 2014 Revolution of Dignity for the movement to “really blossom” Lesia says, and “many NGOs [were] founded at that time as people started to talk about the [issues]”. Following the full-scale invasion in February 2022, USAID funding in Ukraine increased dramatically, to a total of $40 billion by the end of 2024.

While more than 90% of funding in the last three years has gone to direct budget support, helping the government pay for things like repairs to its decimated energy infrastructure and emergency bomb shelters, it has also been vital for countries “in the so called grey-zone between Russia and the West” says former British Ambassador to Georgia, Alexandra Hall Hall.

Since 2022, USAID funding has allowed countries “like Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia to bolster their resilience against Russian aggression. [Their] activities included massive support for civil society organisations to monitor corruption, observe elections, campaign for better human rights, and hold governments to account, and to governments in the region themselves to fight disinformation, strengthen their militaries, enhance their economic performance, and improve their public services.”

For organisations like Lesia’s, US foreign aid has been the reason their work has been possible and Trump’s freeze now poses an existential threat. Less than a week after receiving the stop work order, she met with PIE’s other co-founders to determine the feasibility of continuing the project.

“There was just this flow of messages from other organisations saying we have to fire people,” she says, “and we’re trying to imagine how I will [go] to these blind veterans and tell them we’re stopping work. I couldn’t do this.” Putting the decision to a vote, they resolved to find a way to struggle on, but have had to lose approximately one third of their staff. “I was very stressed” Lesia says, recalling seeing “thousands of posts on LinkedIn” made by frantic NGO staffers all looking work.

While PIE has made the decision to carry on, it is not without sacrificing some of its objectives. The sound beacons they previously donated they must now sell to institutions and businesses to cover some of their costs. Many organisations have shut down completely, including one HIV clinic Lesia knows of that depended entirely on USAID grants. 

In Zhytomyr, a small city eighty miles west of Kyiv, an organisation that provides a safe space for the city’s LGBT community, as well as mental health support and family intervention faces losing its community centre. Ty Ne Odin (You Are Not Alone) received 90% of its funding through USAID sub-grantees and its coordinator Oleksandra Semenova is also finding herself forced to reduce its operations and services while she seeks alternative sources of finance.

“There are opportunities to find funding but it requires considerable effort” she says, “it’s a complex and time consuming process, especially in situations where resources are limited”. 

Finding replacement funding is a pressing concern, even with foreign aid from the US, finding funding for has been a challenge for civil society NGOs as the focus of crowdfunding efforts in Ukraine has shifted substantially towards raising money for the country’s military. “It is harder” Lesia says, now even more so as organisations hit by the freeze compete over limited alternatives. “Let’s say we have projects for $25,000 and we could have three or four projects, it might be like $200,000 dollars per year” she says, “now we [are competing] for 10,000 euros. It will definitely make our project less, and the impact and number of beneficiaries also will be less.”

Ty Ne Odin’s Oleksandra agrees. “Before the freeze, USAID was definitely important for the stability and development of NGOs in Ukraine” Oleksandra says, “This assistance not only allowed for the implementation of projects, but contributed to the ability of organisation to adapt to changing conditions, including the war.”

Much like projects in the UK funded by EU grants before Brexit, it is only now, after the cessation of funding, that the scale of the benefit of USAID in Ukraine has begun to be revealed. At a time when Russian aggression has become a very immediate and complicated geopolitical concern for Western nations, pulling funding that has been instrumental in the decommunisation of Ukraine could prove to be incredibly short sighted. “It’s a self defeating move,” says Alexandra Hall Hall, “betraying the people in other countries who shared American values, giving free rein to corrupt autocrats aligned with Russia to consolidate their power, and reducing American leverage on them, by removing the incentive of massive financial aid.”

Even if the freeze lasts only the 90 days promised by the Trump White House, its ramifications will be far reaching and not easily undone. No one yet knows the true scale of the fallout, in large part because of the previously under-recognised depth and breadth of work that USAID made possible.

As time draws on and the number of organisations and beneficiaries affected becomes clearer, so too does the the importance of USAID in nurturing western values abroad and in affording the US influence in places such as Ukraine. Since the Second World War, this kind of soft power has been a key facet of strengthening Western hegemony and rebuffing the influence of the so-called “axis of upheaval” or China, Russia and Iran.

Now, as well as betraying people in the “grey-zone” countries, removing foreign aid may yet prove to be a significant shot in the foot for the US and its own security, and one fired by its own administration. “For now, I have money to pay, I’m writing applications” says Lesia “but I think we will see the problems of stopping financing, the problems of this gap, two or three years after.” She may not be wrong, and those problems may well be seen not just in Ukraine but much closer to home as well.