The Key Source of Cash Drying Up for Ukraine

As Russian tanks began rumbling toward Kyiv on the morning of Feb. 24, 2022, Jonas Ohman was in a hotel in southern Ukraine. The founder of Blue and Yellow — a Lithuanian charity created in 2014 to help Ukraine fight Russia — Ohman had just finished making the last of his deliveries when he got a call alerting him that the full-scale invasion had started.

“I decided on the spot to go to Poland,” Ohman said. He flagged down a taxi and paid 500 Euros, in cash, for a stressful ride to the border. On the way, he got a stunning call from the charity’s accountant: Ukraine’s fortunes may have been plummeting, but Blue and Yellow was being swamped with donations.

“He said, ‘Jonas, we have 1 million Euros. No, we have 2 million Euros. No, we have 3 million Euros!’” Ohman recalled in an interview. “It was like a dear friend got diagnosed with cancer and I won the lottery on the same day.”

For Ohman, the next several months were a blur. Gifts poured in. Individuals made contributions every minute. Corporations wrote sizable checks daily. He and his colleagues worked round the clock to turn those donations into gear to send back to Ukraine.

A few months later, things began to calm down, giving Ohman and his team a chance to take stock. What they found was troubling. The flood of money the group had received during the war’s first months was drying up — quickly. In March, they had raised $14.8 million. In April, the figure dropped to $5.1 million. By May, it was $2.4 million; by June, $1.5 million. In August, it dropped to just over $850,000.

“We were obviously afraid,” Ohman told me. His organization, at first overwhelmed with donations, was now facing the opposite problem: that its funding might completely dissipate.

More than 2½ years into Ukraine’s war against Russia, there has been significant media coverage on the tapering of government aid for Kyiv. But much less attention has focused on the decline of what was once an outpouring of private aid. When Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine, ordinary people across the world mobilized to help Kyiv. Thousands upon thousands donated to the country’s cause. Others went to Ukraine to assist, including by joining its military. Their contributions could not match government aid, but they became vital to the war effort. Private groups are typically faster at distributing assistance than are outside states (or, sometimes, the Ukrainian state). International donors and volunteers bolster Ukrainian morale. And crucially, charities provide basic-but-essential goods — uniforms, food, night vision goggles — that governments often neglect.

Now this ecosystem is in jeopardy. Almost every pro-Ukraine group is raising far less money than it did in the first year. They are losing volunteers, too. As a result, they are contributing much less to the war effort than they once were. Some are at risk of shutting.

“It’s much more difficult to do what we’re doing,” said Aušra Tallat-Kelpša Di Raimondo, the leader of Blue and Yellow USA, the American affiliate of Blue and Yellow Lithuania. “We’re not getting enough donations.”

The aid groups are finding it hard to solve this problem. It may, in fact, prove harder than getting Congress to approve the $60.8 billion aid package that passed in April after months and months of delay. Private organizations are trying to raise money at a time when Ukraine has been eclipsed in the news and the country’s cause has become less popular.

What’s more, pro-Ukraine activists and organizations must overcome their own exhaustion. Volunteering is hard work, even for casual participants. For leaders, it can exact a profound, personal cost. Several people I spoke with said their efforts had put them in perilous financial situations and fractured — or outright broken — their relationships.

A few people have managed to stabilize their organizations, including Ohman. They have done so, in part, by moving away from volunteerism and becoming more professional. Blue and Yellow, for example, hired full-time staff, which improved its fundraising.

But even groups that professionalize still depend, at least to an extent, on people willing to give almost everything to help Ukraine. And volunteerism, with all the chaotic energy it entails, is what made these organizations so effective in the beginning. By professionalizing, leaders told me their groups were becoming more like the lumbering institutions they were designed to work around: national governments.

Together, then, these forces have raised a disconcerting question. Ukraine has long counted on grassroots energy to keep up its fight. Can it be sustained?

Ukraine is not the first warring state to rely on external, private assistance. During the Spanish Civil War, the American Friends of Spanish Democracy raised money to help Spain’s loyalist government as it fought Francisco Franco’s nationalists. (Thousands of Americans and Europeans went to fight for the loyalists directly.) Before the United States entered World War II, Americans donated to the United Kingdom as it battled the Nazis.

But even compared with those efforts, Ukraine is unique in scale, already receiving far more than $1 billion in private, international donations. Perhaps no other modern government has made non-state aid so integral to its war effort. Ukrainian officials have created an entire organization, called United24, to collect private gifts. And they have authorized a charity, the Come Back Alive Foundation, to procure weapons.

It is easy to see why Kyiv is focused on private aid. The Ukrainian government cannot fund its defense on its own, and while Western states offer invaluable assistance, they focus more on ammunition and expensive equipment only governments can procure, not the smaller but essential gear needed day-to-day. “There are whole categories of products that are just not being provided by governments,” said Andrey Lisovich, leader of Ukraine Defense Fund, a quasi-private group charged by the Ukrainian government with procuring non-lethal equipment. Troops, he said, “need phones, tablets, laptops. They need monitors. All electronics need batteries.”

Charities have been essential to meeting these needs. No one knows precisely how many items they have donated, but the figure is likely in the millions. The donations were particularly sizable in the war’s first year. “We were sending primarily drones, night-vision equipment and optics, plates, helmets, carriers and uniforms,” said Tallat-Kelpša, whose group raised over $1 million in the first 10 months of the invasion. United Help Ukraine, which raised tens of millions of dollars in 2022, told me they sent 5,000 bulletproof vests and 100,000 tourniquets. Hope for Ukraine, a New Jersey-based group that raised over $6 million in 2022, was able to stuff a shipping container with aid — including food and medical supplies — every week or two.

“The entire war is crowdfunded,” said Matthew Sampson, a former U.S. soldier who serves in Ukraine’s International Legion, a unit of the Ukrainian armed forces composed of foreign volunteers. Like many NATO veterans now fighting in Ukraine, he is acutely aware of what Kyiv lacks. Foreign donors, Sampson said, allowed his unit to purchase food and fuel. They gave them cars. They even helped pay for housing. “For our safe houses, we had to pay rent, utilities and repairs,” Sampson told me. “Ukraine doesn’t have the money for any of that stuff.”

But today, almost every group helping the country — big and small alike — is taking in less money than before. During the first year of the war, Come Back Alive raised roughly $38 million in non-Ukrainian currencies. In the more than 18 months since, it has raised less than half that figure. United Help Ukraine also said donations had decreased, although they didn’t provide details. Hope for Ukraine said they raised roughly a third as much in 2023 as they did in 2022. “It was like a big roller coaster,” said Yuriy Boyechko, the group’s leader. “There was a big high, and then there was a big drop.”

It is hard to measure exactly what effect this decline has had on Ukraine’s war effort. But at a minimum, it has complicated an already tough situation. Russia is on the offensive, slowly stripping Ukraine of territory in the east. In response, Kyiv launched an incursion into the Russian province of Kursk, hoping to draw away Russian forces, but Moscow has pressed on. “With lessened aid, you’ve got more people wounded, more people needing help, more buildings being destroyed,” said Tallat-Kelpša. When I asked her what her group was providing less of, her answer was simple: “everything.”

The drop-off is evident on the battlefield. “It endangers a lot of lives,” Sampson said. He cited, in particular, the dearth of night vision systems. Ukraine depends heavily on private organizations for high-quality night vision, and the decline in aid has had predictably unfortunate results. Sampson’s unit, for instance, lost a pricey, U.S.-made armored vehicle after a soldier without good night vision drove it into a ditch.

The shortage has cost other troops more than just gear. The Ukrainian battlefield is littered with explosives, making it impossible to safely pass after dark without proper night vision. But Ukrainian soldiers sometimes have no choice but to move after sunset, and so they press ahead even when they can’t see. The outcome is gruesome.

“They walk into minefields and get themselves killed,” Sampson said.

To an extent, organizers said the ebb in donations was understandable. Almost no event, not even a major war, can command endless attention. “Everything distracts from Ukraine, all the time,” said Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian deputy prime minister in charge of United24. Keeping the world’s attention, he told me, is the body’s main goal.

Leaders are also fighting compassion fatigue. The percentage of Europeans who want to give Kyiv military and financial aid fell by 7 and 10 percentage points, respectively, from spring 2022 to spring 2024, according to the EU’s Eurobarometer surveys. Studies by the Pew Research Center show that the number of Americans who believe the U.S. is giving too much to Ukraine rose by 24 percentage points from March 2022 to April 2024. The number of Republicans who believe the U.S. is offering too much support has increased more than fivefold.

The shift in views is visible on the ground. Almost every U.S. group I spoke with said the bruising congressional fight earlier this year over whether to provide more aid took a toll on gifts. Tallat-Kelpša told me that donations ticked up slightly after the aid bill passed, but she feared the charged, partisan debate has permanently sapped American largess. In 2022, Blue and Yellow USA received gifts from blue and red states in equal measure. Now, liberal ones were clearly outpacing their conservative counterparts. Other groups reported similar partisan splits.

Private aid groups would, of course, like to change these dynamics. But doing so is exceptionally difficult. Charities cannot sabotage the Russian war machine or make Kyiv the center of global attention. They can and do lobby elected officials to support Ukraine, but they have little power over the people promoting Ukraine skepticism, such as former President Donald Trump.

In fact, if anything, these organizations’ struggles could exacerbate both forces. Less aid makes it harder for Ukraine to prevail. And the drop in donations might signal to politicians that there are few benefits to being pro-Kyiv. The result would be a vicious cycle, where weakening nonprofits lead to weakening overall support.

To overcome these dynamics, many leaders have gone into overdrive. After returning from the war, a former foreign legion soldier named Carl Larson worked for months to establish a charity called Ukraine Defense Support. It was an exhausting process, demanding long meetings and constant outreach that typically yielded little. “I’ll be honest, I’d go home, and I’d cry,” Larson said, describing the early days. To keep helping when others would not, Larson pumped in his own cash, maxing out three credit cards.

His efforts eventually worked. In the fall of 2022, Ukraine Defense Support began to attract attention and today, it is the rare group receiving more donations than it was when it started. But that success has come at a steep price. Larson’s wife, exasperated by his total devotion to Ukraine, divorced him.

There is also more to maintaining a nonprofit than intense personal dedication. Most of the groups who are thriving are doing so by bringing on paid staff, carrying out better targeted fundraising campaigns, and creating systems that give people clear tasks, rather than asking them to do everything.

That is how Blue and Yellow Lithuania became sustainable. The group has grown from being a small, all-volunteer corps to an institution with more than dozen paid workers. These employees do everything from managing inventory to marketing. Thanks to their efforts, the organization has largely stabilized its finances (albeit at lower levels than during year one) — including by fundraising on television. The new structure has also made life easier for its workers, Ohman among them. “I get paid,” he told me. “That’s great.”

But to bring on salaried staff, groups need to have a surplus of cash. They also need to employ people who both care deeply about helping Ukraine and have the right skills. “We learned the hard way that somebody that’s a good volunteer is not necessarily a good worker,” Ohman said. That included him. As his organization marched on, Ohman discovered he could not keep up with managerial tasks. To make sure the group kept functioning, he fired himself and hired a new chief executive. (Ohman’s title is “founder and chairman,” and he still serves as the overall leader.)

And although professional organizations are more durable, they can be less effective than groups of volunteers. Blue and Yellow, for example, became slower thanks to its formalized systems. “You have to do one thing and there are five, six people that need to deal with it,” Ohman said. “Then you have to wait for licenses and papers.” As it grew bigger, Blue and Yellow also gained a higher profile and, accordingly, more scrutiny. Other growing groups told me they were facing similar problems.

Whether these groups can find the right balance is an open question — just like whether they can stay in business. The future of the ecosystem is, unfortunately, uncertain.

But most leaders told me that they are committed to staying the course irrespective of the costs. They care too much and have come too far.

“It’s not about the money,” Ohman told me. It’s about the right thing to do.”