Why the Ukraine crisis is a defining moment for George Soros’ OSF

While entertaining some of the world’s wealthiest and most influential people last week at his annual dinner on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum meeting, billionaire philanthropist George Soros issued a dire warning about Europe’s future in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Even when the fighting stops, as it eventually must, the situation will never revert to what it was before. The invasion may have been the beginning of the Third World War, and our civilization may not survive it,” Soros said on May 24, exactly three months since Russian forces entered the country. The war is a defining moment for Soros, a 91-year-old Hungarian American who has devoted many years of his life to pro-democracy work as the founder of the Open Society Foundations, a network of foundations and offices working in more than 120 countries. He views the conflict as an ultimate test of whether democracy can prevail — not just in Ukraine but worldwide. In March, OSF contributed an initial $25 million to launch a fund for “a Free and Democratic Ukraine,” with the goal of raising a total of $100 million from other foundations, philanthropists, and the private sector. Beyond OSF’s own contribution, the fund has so far collected more than $18 million from donors such as the Schmidt Family, Oak, and Ford foundations, “with further commitments in the pipeline,” OSF spokesperson Jonathan Birchall told Devex. The funds are being distributed as grants to organizations in Ukraine and other countries. The International Renaissance Foundation, or IRF — an OSF foundation in Ukraine — is involved in all aspects of this work, such as strategy, fund governance, and some grant-making to civil society partners in country, Birchall added. The democracy fund is intended to sustain Ukraine’s civil society, including a free media and human rights, OSF President Mark Malloch-Brown told Devex. Those aspects of a free society are now under threat as towns are taken over by Russian forces and civilians are killed. “If democracy is on trial in this crisis, democracy’s answer has to be that it’s a system that works for everybody,” Malloch-Brown said. At last week’s dinner event, Soros described growing struggles between two “diametrically opposed” systems of governance worldwide: open societies that protect the freedom of the individual and closed societies in which the role of the individual is to serve state rulers. And as those struggles ramp up, he said, other priorities — such as avoiding nuclear war and fighting climate change — have “had to take a back seat to that struggle.” “Therefore, we must mobilize all our resources to bring the war to an early end,” Soros told the well-heeled crowd. “The best and perhaps only way to preserve our civilization is to defeat [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. … That’s the bottom line.” The project of democracy-building As a teenager, Soros lived through the siege of Budapest during the winter of 1944-1945, when Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ordered the German army to try to hold out against advancing Soviet forces. Soros has said that the “horrible images coming out of Ukraine” are reminiscent of Budapest during that time, as well as the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. Soros, a former hedge fund owner whose net worth is currently estimated at $8.5 billion, said at the dinner that he embarked on “political philanthropy” in the 1980s largely in response to Communist rule of the Soviet Union. OSF has had a “huge” impact in Eastern Europe and was often “the only funder of independent civil society” in some parts of the region, such as Serbia during the Yugoslav Wars, said Merrill Sovner, an assistant director at the City University of New York’s European Union Studies Center who researches the role of civil society and philanthropic organizations in democracies. “At the same time, this [war in Ukraine] is also sort of a very clear comment on why that approach might not have worked — the whole project of trying to support democratization,” she said. “It will take time for academics and others to think about and study what this moment means for the project of democracy-building in general,” added Sovner, who previously worked on civil society programs for OSF. OSF officially began its charity work in Europe upon opening its first foundation in Hungary in 1984. Its approach has been to establish a network of regional foundations and staff them with local people who can guide its grant-making. OSF established IRF in 1990 as the Soviet Union was collapsing and Ukraine was on the brink of gaining its independence. The grant-making organization has spent over $230 million on pro-democracy activities and supported more than 9,000 projects and initiatives. Some of IRF’s work over the years has included funding investigative journalism projects to uncover government corruption and supporting the creation of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. IRF and its partners also have supported the International Criminal Court’s investigation of alleged war crimes in Ukraine, as well as in the Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. A new path Since the start of the war, IRF has adopted a new mission, joining a kind of a “Civil Frontline” of civil society groups working to defend Ukraine and provide humanitarian aid to people swept up in the conflict, including those who have started returning to Kyiv after Russian forces withdrew from the region around the city. IRF’s five priorities are ensuring protection of civil society, helping obtain critical medical supplies, supporting those defending public safety, supporting Ukrainian media while preventing the spread of Russian misinformation, and documenting potential Russian war crimes for future prosecutions, IRF Executive Director Oleksandr Sushko told Devex. IRF has started meeting with donors and making plans for “a post-war Ukraine and a future with a fully functioning civil society,” Sushko wrote in a May 6 blog post. In the weeks leading up to the Russian invasion, Sushko said he and other IRF staffers quietly gathered computer servers, essential documents, and technical equipment from the organization’s headquarters in Kyiv. They moved their base operations west to Lviv. But IRF’s main office in Kyiv has since partially reopened for business and meetings. “My position is that we have to be in Ukraine as long as possible,” Sushko told Devex in an interview in March. “This is very important — that people like us are not evacuating without ultimate threat to our lives — because this is a very essential signal to the rest of the society that we are here, that we are continuing to coordinate this essential work, which is needed for people here.” IRF recently joined Ukrainian civil society groups in appealing for a green, sustainable post-war reconstruction of the country’s economy and infrastructure. However, IRF has also remained focused on the immediate needs of Ukrainians. It has shifted its attention from long-term grant-making support for smaller civil society and pro-democracy groups toward providing short-term grants for humanitarian aid and emergency assistance. The foundation also recently partnered with CARE Germany to launch a new “humanitarian solidarity” initiative to identify potential local recipients of small, short-term grants of up to $12,500 to assist Ukrainians forced to leave their homes, Birchall told Devex last month. In total, IRF has made about 140 grants to local groups while itself handling 120 direct procurement orders for medicine, home, and schooling supplies supporting an estimated 50,000 people since the start of the war. Growing authoritarianism The precarity of the situation that IRF and its grantees now find themselves in raises the stakes of OSF’s mission amid a global backslide into authoritarianism. Democracy has declined in 60 countries over the past year, according to a 2022 report from democracy advocacy group Freedom House. In a March op-ed in Euronews, OSF Deputy Chair Alexander Soros — son of George Soros — said that his organization also previously worked in Russia “supporting legal reforms, fighting against the spread of HIV/Aids, and even paying the salaries for a while of former Soviet scientists” before it was eventually ousted by Putin. “If democracy is on trial in this crisis, democracy’s answer has to be that it’s a system that works for everybody.” --— Mark Malloch-Brown, president, OSF OSF was forced to cease operations in the country in 2015 after the Russian government said it had determined OSF posed a “threat to the foundations of the constitutional system of the Russian Federation and the security of the state.” OSF also moved its regional headquarters away from Budapest in 2018, saying it faced pressure from Hungarian laws — known as “Stop Soros” legislation — that targeted NGOs serving refugees and migrants. There is great fear within OSF that Putin, having stymied open society tenets in Russia, could now plunge more of the region deeper into authoritarianism. The “entire world is affected by Russia’s attack,” said Viorel Ursu, division director with OSF’s Europe and Eurasia program, in a press release on the day of the Russian invasion. Further, he said, despite Russia being a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, the country was denying the “fundamental rules of global security.” Russia has, so far, blocked council action on Ukraine. Russia’s veto power as a council member also extends to investigations by the International Criminal Court, which means that it could thwart efforts by OSF and others to push the court to prosecute Putin for what is known as a crime of aggression. “This is a defining moment for open societies,” Malloch-Brown said in a statement when OSF’s democracy fund launched. “Whatever the Kremlin might say, it is clear that what Putin is really afraid of is neither NATO nor nuclear weapons, but a free and flourishing democracy on his doorstep.” Update, June 3, 2022: This article has been updated to clarify why Open Society Foundations moved the organization’s regional headquarters away from Budapest, Hungary, in 2018.