The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
For donors, Ukraine aid creates blurry ethical line
Bulletproof vests and drones. Pickup trucks, walkietalkies 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.
“We’ve had these discussions countless times,” said Igor Markov, a director of the nonprofit Nova Ukraine, about where to draw the line between what aid is humanitarian versus that which supports the active defense — the fighting — in his home country.
His Stanford, Californiabased organization, which delivered some $59 million in aid to Ukraine since Russia invaded a year ago, decided ultimately not to support volunteer fighters.
“We realized there’s a significant amount of money that would be ruled out,” he said, pointing to platforms that facilitate matching employee donations, like Benevity, and some major companies, like Google, that require nonprofits to promise their aid does not support active fighting as a condition of receiving contributions.
Throughout 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.
Markov said he contributed to buying equipment for Ukraine’s frontline defenders as an individual. And he points out that items like drones and pickup trucks may not usually be considered military equipment before asking, “Guess how they’re used?”
“It could be used to just carry food. It could be used to carry munitions,” he said of the vehicles, adding that Ukrainian fighters have been creative in using whatever equipment they have. Drones, meanwhile, have become an essential tool in the fighting.
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.
“You can’t support war fighting, can’t support killing people, even if it’s killing the bad guys,” he said. “It’s not consistent with the law of charity.”
But Kurtz 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 front of a federal commission that includes members of Congress in December, along with nonprofit leaders including Dora Chomiak, president of Razom for Ukraine, a nonprofit based in New York that has seen the contributions it receives jump from around $200,000 a year to at least $75 million in 2022.
“We’re open. Our aid and our medical equipment and our communications equipment are going to people who are defending the country,” Chomiak said in a recent interview, speaking from Lviv, Ukraine.
Though it has delivered more than a thousand drones, her organization ruled out fundraising for military equipment because it did not fit into the organization’s charitable mission, Chomiak said. Changing that mission and getting the necessary licenses would have detracted from more immediately impactful actions, she said, such as delivering tens of thousands of specialized first aid kits to the frontlines and lobbying Congress to support Ukraine’s government. A Razom spokesperson said all its new work is in line with its charitable mission.
Companies too, which have given some of the largest publicly known donations to Ukraine, must also consider to what extent their donations are directly supporting Ukraine’s war effort. Microsoft Corp. has donated at least $430 million in services and cash in 2022. That doesn’t include the cybersecurity services it has provided to Ukraine’s government and some private sector groups.