Ukraine’s private donors in legal, ethical gray area

NEW YORK — Bulletproof vests and drones. Pickup trucks, walkie-talkies and tourniquets. These are just some of the items that individuals and nonprofits have donated to buy and ship to Ukraine, where sometimes they are then used by those fighting Russia’s invasion.

Through the past year, U.S. and European companies, individuals and organizations have navigated local and international regulations to provide aid and grappled with similar moral questions about whether or not to donate to an allied nation’s defense.

Under U.S. laws, nonprofits are not allowed to donate to people in combat, said New York attorney Daniel Kurtz, a partner at Pryor Cashman.

But he doubts that the IRS will examine donations to Ukraine — in part for reasons of capacity, but also because of the political support for Ukraine’s government.

“While I’m sure some of them are carefully lawyered, there’s enormous pressure to provide this support,” he said of nonprofits. “So my guess is probably a lot of people are just going ahead and doing it.”

The reality, as described by some nonprofit leaders, is that everyone in Ukraine is fighting to defend the country, from children to an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor.

“It’s better to call them people who defend our state with weapons and people who bring them the bullets,” said Serhiy Prytula, founder of the Prytula Charity Foundation, a Ukraine-based organization that calls itself a charity but does not offer a tax advantage to donors.

He was testifying in December in front of a federal commission that includes members of Congress, along with nonprofit leaders including Dora Chomiak, president of Razom for Ukraine, a nonprofit based in New York that has seen its incoming contributions jump from around $200,000 a year to at least $75 million in 2022.

Individuals in the U.S. have raised funds or even fought in conflicts in which the government was not a party, said Andrew Morris, who teaches history at Union College. Before the U.S. entered World War II, Japanese Americans were one among several immigrant groups that raised funds and sent aid back to their countries of origin, including packages directly to Japanese soldiers.

“It’s not guns but it’s going directly to the military,” he said. “Is that a distinction without a difference?”

The U.S. government eventually saw such relief efforts as evidence of Japanese disloyalty when they interred whole communities after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Around the same time, it tolerated the work of another group that shipped weapons to Britain’s ill-equipped Home Guard, despite the U.S. being formally neutral at the time, Morris said.

“I think that makes it a lot easier for this private sector, voluntary donations to flow in the direction that U.S. foreign policy is,” he said, though in general the government has discouraged individuals from pursuing their own foreign policy objectives.