How US foreign aid cuts are threatening independent media in former Soviet states

Before Donald Trump’s administration suspended – and subsequently resumed – American military aid to Ukraine, it had announced its intention to cut 90% of United States Agency for International Development (USAid) foreign aid contracts. These funding cuts will endanger life around the world, including in Ukraine.

USAid has provided Ukraine with US$2.6 billion (£2 billion) in humanitarian aid, US$5 billion in development assistance, and more than US$30 billion in direct budget support since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. The funding has helped pay for bomb shelters and medical equipment, among other things.

But the purge of US foreign aid programmes will also affect Ukraine and other former Soviet countries in more insidious ways. The funding cuts could lead to a decline in the number of independent media outlets in the region, which are key to the fight for democracy and human rights.

Government censorship over the war in Ukraine has led to the collapse of independent journalism in Russia. Russian media reports on the war, which they still refer to as a “special military operation”, can only use official Russian military sources. Violating laws on disseminating “fake news” is penalised by hefty prison sentences.

These developments led to an exodus of international news organisations from Russia shortly after the start of the war, with global news media citing the need to protect their journalists. Since relocating from Moscow to the Latvian capital, Riga, US government-funded Radio Free Europe’s reporting on the war in Ukraine has been highly acclaimed.

It has also been growing in popularity in Russia, despite being labelled “undesirable” – and effectively blocked – by the Russian authorities. According to a 2023 survey, 9% of the Russian adult population consume Radio Free Europe content every week. Official Russian media saw domestic audience numbers fall by as much as 30% in 2024.

However, the cuts to US foreign aid risk squandering this growing advantage in the struggle to report on the Ukraine war objectively. Radio Free Europe, which billionaire businessman Elon Musk described in February as “just radical left crazy people talking to themselves”, has had all of its US grants pulled.

It already updates its website less, and it is reportedly contemplating staff cuts. Its online television channel, Current Time, has had to close down some of its programmes. The Czech foreign minister, Jan Lipavsky, has said he would discuss with fellow EU foreign ministers “how to at least partially maintain” the group’s broadcasting.

Ukraine’s media outlets are also now facing a crisis. Despite martial law, Ukrainian media stands out as a positive example of media diversity and independence in the post-Soviet world. Ukraine ranks 61 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ press freedom index. This puts it well above Russia, Belarus and all of the former Soviet countries apart from Moldova and the Baltic states.

However, many Ukrainian media outlets are experiencing the effects of US foreign funding cuts. The subscription model followed by English language publication, the Kyiv independent, is rare in the region. One of the affected organisations is Ukrainian Pravda, an online news outlet that has played a leading role in Ukrainian civil society.

Journalists at Ukrainian Pravda, which is now facing funding cuts of up to 15%, were key in covering Ukraine’s so-called Revolution of Dignity in 2014. Pro-European and anti-corruption protests ultimately brought down the Russian-backed government of Viktor Yanukovych.

While covering deadly clashes between protesters and the police in Kyiv on January 24 2014, Ukrainian Pravda’s website received over 1.6 million visitors. This was a record for Ukrainian online media at the time.

Resilient media landscape

One cause for optimism is the media’s resilience in former Soviet countries. The media landscape in the region has successfully adapted to many disruptions over the past 35 years.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant the creation of new national media. This involved a shift from state-funded to market-funded models, often through advertising, as well as negotiating the wider move from analogue to digital.

An encouraging example is the Artdocfest film festival. It began life in Moscow in 2007 showing independent Russian language or Russia-related documentary films. Depicting opposition figures and taboo topics, the festival served as an oasis of free speech in a growing desert of repression and conformism.

As political restrictions on what the festival could show grew more severe, it partially relocated to Riga in 2014, the year Russia invaded eastern Ukraine. And following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the festival no longer screens any films in Russia, as well as any films funded by the Russian government.

The relocation has required finding new funding sources, shifting the focus away from Russia itself by making English (as opposed to Russian) the festival’s official language, and introducing a new Baltic programme. The festival remains a forum for criticising the shortcomings of Russia and other post-Soviet societies.

In implicit tribute to Artdocfest’s importance, the Russian television network RT has created its own similar sounding RTdocfest, where the Kremlin’s narrative is the only one.

Since 2022, the Russian slogan sila v pravde (“strength is in truth”) has become one of the rallying cries of the country’s campaign in Ukraine. It is widely known from Brother 2, an anti-Ukrainian Russian film released in 2000.

There is a bitter irony in its espousal by Vladimir Putin’s regime, which has been founded on lies, disinformation and distortion. Nevertheless, strength does lie in truth.

Ensuring the region’s independent media landscape remains is critical to telling the truth about Russia’s war in Ukraine, and exposing injustice and corruption throughout the post-Soviet world.

This article first appeared in 'The Conversation' on 25 March 2025.