Across the former Soviet bloc, rightwing and autocratic governments have their knives out for USAid, demanding data on grant recipients from Elon Musk and threatening employees and grant recipients with investigations and prison.
USAid has long been a thorn in the side of governments in the region who have railed against US support for pro-democracy and civil society movements. Now, local leaders for the first time see an ally in Washington that will back a crackdown on USAid and its beneficiaries as “criminals”.
In Georgia, the government has opened a mysterious case alleging foreign influence meant to undermine the country’s national security. The case was initiated by United Neutral Georgia, a conservative pro-government party that has accused the opposition of maintaining a western “spy network”. The case was announced days after the prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, accused the US embassy, USAid, and other US-backed organisations of “acting in a coordinated manner against the Georgian people and the Georgian state”.
The Guardian has received reports of multiple foreign nationals in another country who have been questioned as part of an investigation into USAid and its association with local employees. It is not clear if they have been charged with a crime. A report on the incidents has also been delivered to the Senate foreign affairs committee. USAid directed the Guardian to address questions on the incidents to the state department, which did not reply to an official request for comment.
Current and former officials at USAid and the state department warned that the lack of support for USAid employees in the field had left them in danger in high-risk environments. The environment would be a “field day” for recruitment for foreign intelligence agencies, one US official said.
Leaders and senior officials in other countries have also mulled directly requesting information on grant recipients from Musk and other US officials.
Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, published a letter to Musk in which he asked the tech tycoon to share information about “non-governmental organizations, the media and individual journalists” who have worked in the country.
“It is indisputable that financial resources from USAid were also used for political purposes in Slovakia in order to distort the political system and favour certain political parties,” he wrote.
In Russia, the state duma speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin, said that the government should request a list of people who received funding from USAid and that they should be made to “publicly confess and repent on Red Square”.
“If they’ve declared USAid an enemy organization, then let them provide the names,” said Volodin. “Congress will send us the list, and we’ll hand it over to the FSB.” (Those people would include the ruling party, United Russia, and the current minister of defense, the news website Agentstvo noted).
Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has said that his government is going “line by line” through local organisations that received funds from USAid, claiming they were backed by a leftwing conspiracy planning to topple his government. “Now is the moment when these international networks have to be taken down, they have to be swept away,” Orbán said. “It is necessary to make their existence legally impossible.”
Authoritarian leaders around the world have welcomed Musk’s purge of USAid, an organisation they have long derided as a vehicle of American political interference. But there is a particular irony for the rollback of USAid in the former Soviet bloc, whose influence USAid was established to combat in 1961. The organisation expanded into the region in the 1990s to provide humanitarian aid and to help build up civil society.
“This is Trump’s Afghanistan withdrawal,” said one current USAid employee, who was aware of foreign service nationals who have been questioned by investigators since the USAid ban was announced. “Cutting and running and leaving people who have faithfully and consistently worked for the USA and our interests being left behind to be jailed or worse.”
“Given how authoritarian governments are increasingly looking to find ways to shut down civil society, including by attempting to delegitimize organizations by equating them with foreign interference, the Trump administration should take greater care to safeguard information in these contexts,” said Michelle Strucke, director of the Human Rights Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“They should also consider the impact of their own words. Elon Musk’s tweet that said ‘USAid is a criminal organization’ may have unintended, and potentially devastating consequences, for those who put their lives on the line to serve the United States.”
More countries in the region have said that they plan to enact legislation to eliminate civil society groups that receive foreign funding.
Georgian authorities have vowed to introduce new restrictions targeting the media and civil society, citing Trump’s aid freeze as justification.
“The worldwide USAid scandal … has made it obvious that we should fully reclaim our country,” the ruling Georgian Dream party chair, Mamuka Mdinaradze, said last Wednesday.
The increasingly authoritarian Georgian Dream government said it would introduce a new bill that would “define the standards of media objectivity and ethics” and ban foreign funding for media entirely.
A second proposed bill would eliminate the state’s obligation to involve civil society in legislative decision-making, further restricting public participation in governance in the small nation nestled in the Caucasus mountains. Critics warn that the legislation will stifle Georgia’s civil society, which has already come under mounting pressure in recent years.
Announcing the proposed bills, Mdinaradze praised Trump, claiming that the new US administration was now “openly discussing the great evil” stemming from USAid.
In Kyrgyzstan, President Sadyr Japarov has voiced support for Musk’s proposal to shut down the US-funded broadcasters Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Voice of America.
Japarov specifically called for the closure of Radio Liberty’s Kyrgyz service, Azattyk – an award-winning branch of RFE/RL that offers rare, critical coverage of Kyrgyzstan in English and Kyrgyz.
The president said people no longer needed Azattyk because “they have learned to critically evaluate information”.
There were also voices of concern among officials in the post-Soviet world. In Tajikistan, the health ministry stated that USAid had provided assistance “in the fields of combating tuberculosis, HIV, and malaria, as well as in maternal and child health care and social protection”.
“Until a mechanism for USAid’s future operations is determined, we will look other ways to continue this work,” the country’s health minister added.
