Mark MacKinnon
January 27, 2025
The Globe and Mail
For the past five years, former soldiers living in western Ukraine could go to the Veteran Hub in the city of Vinnytsia for help finding work, psychological support or legal advice for their postcombat lives, even as Russia continued its war against Ukraine. A week after Donald Trump returned to the White House, that service is no more.
The closing of the branch in Vinnytsia is just one of many casualties in Ukraine after Mr. Trump ordered a 90-day halt to most U.S. foreign aid as projects and recipients are evaluated to ensure they are “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.” Veteran Hub, which received about two-thirds of its funding indirectly from the U.S. government, also had to shut down its national crisis hotline that veterans and their family members could call, sometimes when considering suicide.
“It’s very sudden – and it’s very wrecking,” said Ivona Kostyna, the chairperson of Veteran Hub, sitting in the organization’s still-functioning Kyiv headquarters Monday, two days after she had been forced to tell 31 employees that they were no longer getting paid. Veterans facing a mental-health crisis may now find they have nowhere to turn, she added. (The organization was created during the eight-year proxy war that preceded the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022.) “It’s not the problem of the end of funding – it’s the end of commitment that is frightening,” Ms. Kostyna said. “The fact that it happened in one day didn’t give us any time to prepare.”
Worldwide, the executive order Mr. Trump signed on his first day in office means a pause in tens of billions of dollars worth of assistance. Funding is now frozen for projects as diverse as a radio station in Afghanistan that focuses on women’s issues, HIV relief programs in Africa and landmine-clearing projects around the world.
Ukraine looks set to be hit hardest. The U.S. distributed US$68-billion in aid worldwide in 2023, down from a record US$76-billion the previous year. Kyiv was by far the biggest recipient in both years, receiving US$17.2-billion in 2023 and US$18.3-billion in 2022, the year Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the war that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and left entire cities in ruins.
Dozens of other Ukrainian non-governmental organizations received “stop work” notifications over the weekend from the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, including more than a dozen media organizations and at least one LGBTQ centre. “We’ve been instructed to suspend activities funded through these grants for at least 90 days. This affects most of our core operations, including our journalism work, community initiatives and cultural projects,” said Dmytro Tishchenko, a co-founder of Cukr.city, a news portal in the northern city
of Sumy that until Saturday relied on U.S. government assistance to cover 60 per cent of its budget.
The Financial Times reported Saturday that U.S. diplomats in Kyiv had asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make an exemption for Ukraine. Hours after the report, however, multiple USAID recipients told The Globe and Mail they had received e-mails advising them to immediately halt their projects.
The only State Department waivers granting exemptions to the aid freeze so far have been for military aid to Israel and Egypt, as well as for emergency food aid. Valeriy Chaly, a former Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S., said in an interview that he was hopeful Mr. Rubio would eventually exempt Ukraine as well. “Because to put Ukraine with Israel and Egypt is very understandable, even for American taxpayers.”
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said U.S. military assistance – separately worth almost US$66-billion over the past three years – had not yet been stopped, “thank God.”
It’s not yet clear whether any new military aid is coming. Fearing Mr. Trump would end the flow of U.S. weapons to Ukraine, former president Joe Biden authorized a Dec. 30 emergency package of US$2.5-billion worth of air-defence systems, long-range missiles, artillery rounds and other equipment that military experts say will allow Ukraine to continue fighting for much of 2025.
The freeze on USAID funding will also affect the flow of funds supporting Ukrainian government efforts in a range of fields, from the rebuilding of schools, power stations and other critical infrastructure damaged in the war to areas such as cybersecurity and legal reform.
Chemonics International, a private Washington-based firm that disperses grant money abroad, said funding had been cut to “nearly all” the projects it was supporting in Ukraine. The aid freeze “diminishes America’s strength globally,” the company said in a statement. “The threats from America’s rivals – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – will only grow as we cede ground to our adversaries, risking more instability, chaos, and human suffering.”
The move to halt foreign assistance was part of a whirlwind first week in office for Mr. Trump that also saw him signal his intention to deliver on a campaign promise to bring the Russia-Ukraine war to a quick end. Ukrainian officials are worried he will use U.S. leverage over Kyiv to force it to accept a peace deal that grants Mr. Putin most of his war aims, including the annexation of the 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory that Russian troops now occupy and a permanent block on Ukraine joining the NATO military alliance.
Mr. Trump has given his special envoy to Ukraine, retired general Keith Kellogg, 100 days to reach a peace settlement, amid speculation that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin will hold a one-on-one summit to try to reach a deal.
Mr. Chaly said the 100-day timeline was unrealistic, especially if the goal was a lasting peace. “A ceasefire will not bring sustainable peace,” he said, warning that Mr. Zelensky, as well as representatives of the European Union and NATO, need to be present at any Trump-Putin
summit. “Unfortunately, we have on our borders, not a country like Canada, we have Russia. We have the country that just wants to destroy us.”
Back at Veteran Hub, Ms. Kostyna was left wondering if the sudden aid cutoff was part of a U.S. effort to put pressure on Ukraine to accept whatever might be coming next. “As a policy, it is threatening, and we are unsure of what the message is towards Ukraine.”
Mark MacKinnon has been covering international affairs and Canada’s role in the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. Since that moment, he has covered elections and wars, revolutions and refugee crises, in all corners of the world. One of Canada’s most decorated foreign correspondents, Mark has won the National Newspaper Award seven times, and is nominated for an eighth award in 2023 for his ongoing coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Mark has been covering Russia and Ukraine since 2002, when he was first sent abroad to serve as The Globe and Mail’s Moscow bureau chief. He covered the Orange Revolution in 2004 and Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution of Dignity, and witnessed firsthand Russia’s subsequent annexation of Crimea as well as the start of the eight-year proxy war in Donbas. Mark is the author of The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections and Pipeline Politics, which was published in 2007 by Random House, and The China Diaries, an e-book of his train travels through the Middle Kingdom along with photographer John Lehmann.