Ukraine Invasion’s Ripple Effects Must Command Philanthropy’s Attention, Head of Soros Foundation Says

The ripple effects of Russia‘s invasion of Ukraine will be felt worldwide, and foundations need to provide extensive hunger and health-care aid, as well as support for displaced people and other assistance, says Mark Malloch-Brown, president of Open Society Foundations, which last week committed $25 million to its Fund for a Free and Democratic Ukraine and urged other grant makers to provide $75 million.

In the first week after it announced the fund, Open Society, the philanthropy financed by George Soros, received commitments totaling $13 million from the Ford and Oak foundations, the Schmidt Family Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

The health, education, and basic needs of both Ukrainians staying put and those pouring out of the country will be massive, Malloch-Brown says. He hopes the initial influx of humanitarian assistance to Ukraine will be adequate. But more attention needs to be paid to protecting civil-society institutions, like the free press, think tanks, community organizations, academe, and activist groups, he says

Open Society has supported work to advance democracy in Ukraine since 1990. Its new fund will provide some humanitarian relief, but it will be focused on drumming up international support for Ukraine by supporting investigative journalists and researchers who document war crimes and support for human-rights advocacy groups, and to support civil-society efforts in the country.

Stefanie Loos, Redux for the Open Society Foundations

Malloch-Brown, who worked in senior leadership roles at the United Nations before he was selected as Open Society’s president in 2020, said the war is a grave threat to the international political and economic order. That disruption will especially affect foundations that seek to advance international development and provide hunger relief worldwide, he said.

In an interview with the Chronicle, Malloch-Brown outlined what he sees next for philanthropy and for the work Open Society is doing.

Given what we know about the devastation in Ukraine and the exodus of people from the country, how will Open Society Foundation’s Ukraine fund be best put to use?

Charities here and in Europe have had a bumper period of donations. Record donations have been flooding in. So in general, they’ve got the humanitarian well covered. I wouldn’t have wanted to have crossed wires with that effort. I was very anxious that this fund not divert humanitarian dollars to our more medium-term purposes of trying to protect democracy.

Our humanitarian funding will be limited because we can see special pockets of need that are not covered by the more generalized programs. So, for example, we’re seeing refugees or people trying to leave the country — Nigerian students, Roma, others — who haven’t had necessarily as easy a time of it as Ukrainians crossing over. We need to do these things because either the bigger aid can’t get there in time or because it’s aid for groups that have been marginalized in those programs.

What is the Open Society presence in Ukraine, and how have you been able to get aid where it is most needed in a war zone?

At the moment, we are keeping a close security watch on 60 people, our employees and their families. Of those only about four or five have left the country. Just under 20 staff and their families have now moved to Lviv from Kyiv and other smaller offices. We are still overwhelmingly in the country. We think for their own safety, they would be prudent to leave, but there is a high degree of patriotism and loyalty in this group. And we’re finding they want to stay.

I can’t go into all the detail, but we shipped in some satellite phones and other equipment to help our colleagues keep in touch before the conflict began. We have a daily check-in with staff to get an update that they are well and where they are, whether they’ve moved or not. We have access to various open-source security providers to advise staff on where military activity or a bombing may next take place. So it’s a very hands-on. It’s not your old-style foundation.

How can foundations best support Ukrainians?

We’ve already seen two and a half million refugees. And those numbers are going to grow. Whether it is around services to refugees or education, there are going to be a range of services, which it’s important to provide. Philanthropy needs to understand that this is the most consequential conflict that we have seen in many, many decades. This is not because it’s in Europe. It’s because it is a much more fundamental threat to the international order than other conflicts.

Its implications for the global system are huge in terms of the whole framework of international law and respect for sovereignty but also around the massive and very rapid economic and political dislocation that’s going to follow this.

We’re starting to see dramatic movement in food and energy prices in a lot of developing countries, many of which were dependent on grain imports from Ukraine or Russia. They also have economies which are highly dependent on the cost of fuel and energy, and they were already struggling. So into an already quite strained political and economic environment this massive disruption was introduced.

Foundations are going to have their hands full getting their heads around all of this and really understanding the likely knock-on effects that are going to unfold. Therefore they should intervene, and their interventions should not be limited to Ukraine. There are going to be hunger issues, health breakdown issues in a range of African countries and other parts of the world as a knock-on effect of this. It’s a time for vigilance and vision on the part of all foundations.

How much of a setback is the invasion of Ukraine and the rise of totalitarian rulers for Open Society’s reason for being, the establishment and protection of a vibrant civil society?

Why has Putin made such an unprovoked, aggressive invasion of a neighbor? It’s because of the democratic flame in Ukraine, which is a vibrant, argumentative democracy, which really stands in such sharp contrast to the brutal, closed dictatorship that exists in Russia. We really want to protect the ecosystem of democracy, including support for human-rights defenders, civil-society activists, democracy activists, the free media, and all these groups that are the anchor of a free and pluralistic Ukraine.

We’re moving to a period when there’s going to be so much stress and strain in the system made worse by this conflict. We’re really going to see as a crisis less between democracy or authoritarian regimes but more as a crisis of incumbency. It’s going to become very hard for incumbent governments because there are going to be economic shocks and stresses. There is going to be massive reordering of global supply chains and economic and security relationships. And so it’s going to be a turbulent political time.

We’ve had a wake-up call for our kind of value system. As the pendulum starts to swing back to democracy, one of the challenges for foundations like ourselves is we need to keep that democracy open and inclusive, to not go back to a security-state democracy of the kind that we had in the Cold War years when a lot of minorities and other groups felt deeply marginalized. We’ll have our hands full at home and abroad making the case for tolerant societies.

Open Society was long involved in Russia before Putin kicked it and other pro-democracy organizations out. Is there anything about what’s happening internally in Russia that gives you any hope for a free society?

George Soros at the very beginning of our history provided stipends to keep Russian scientists in Russia to prevent the brain drain to the West. He made efforts to prevent the dramatic breakdown of health in Russian prisons and a whole array of issues in addition to more traditional human-rights and democracy spending. We were there trying to build a pluralistic Russia and failed evidently, at least at this point.

We comply with the Russian law and therefore don’t have an office or direct grantees. We still try to look for any opportunity we can. We have a lot of Russian speakers in the organization because of our history in the country. We’re looking for openings.

What we were guilty of as a generation was misreading history. There was a sort of euphoria about implanting democratic, pluralistic structures in countries coming out of a nightmare period of communist rule. It proved much more difficult than was expected. But Ukraine is a conflict due to the success of democracy, not its failure. For Putin, seeing such a vibrant, cheeky, ironic, humorous, argumentative Ukraine in Zelensky is a fundamental metaphysical threat.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.