Why was the US funding LGBT "Pride" marches in Ukraine?

An LGBT Pride march in Kyiv, Ukraine on June 16, 2024

There is an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization, for the uninitiated) called “KyivPride” that runs the annual LGBT “Pride” march in Ukraine, and has done so for approximately a decade. KyivPride, like many similarly situated organizations, received US government largesse through a dizzying array of funding mechanisms — mainly stemming from USAID, the agency to which a sledgehammer has now ostensibly been taken by the Second Trump Administration. Whatever else one may think of the recent developments around USAID, it’s simply factually correct to state that US taxpayers had previously been subsidizing LGBT activism in the Donbass — a fact that can only be seen as facially ridiculous when explained to the majority of Americans. Simply take a look at KyivPride’s own public website for confirmation of its highly fruitful partnership with USAID:

As much as the newly emboldened DOGE whiz-kid crew might want to take credit for dramatically unearthing and exposing these blunderous expenditures, the reality is they’ve long been available for public inspection. That they never aroused much scrutiny till now is perhaps the real scandal.

As the money has gotten doled out, the standardized LGBT acronym has concurrently grown (now approximating something like 2SLGBTQIA+, but who’s really keeping track anymore). US diplomatic personnel participated in a Ukrainian “Pride” march in September 2021, a few months before the Russian invasion, when there perhaps might’ve been some more pressing diplomatic matters to attend to. An annual report from USAID on its Ukraine-related activities, which I helpfully saved years ago before DOGE largely nuked the agency’s assets from the internet, boasts that these Pride Marches had been “safely conducted” in Ukraine since 2015 — a year after the Ukrainian government was overthrown in a violent putsch, and US funding for “civil society” organs in the country greatly accelerated. These expenditures, while not literally hidden, were obscured behind a labyrinth of grants, sub-grants, and convoluted acronyms:

From a February 2019 USAID report on activities in Ukraine

Such programs continued unperturbed during the First Trump Administration, when a touching project meant to increase transgender visibility in Ukrainian Fashion Week was funded through USAID’s program to “Enhance Non-Governmental Actors and Grassroots Engagement” (ENGAGE) in Ukraine:

Anyone who thought this iteration of USAID could realistically survive a new Republican Administration — and continue to advertise such job titles as “Senior LGBTQI+ Coordinator,” with a mission of “advancing global LGBTQI+ rights and inclusive development” — must have gravely misread the political dynamics of 2025. No longer could it be tenable for US-backed grants to be perpetually solicited in line with the “thematic priority” of fostering “inclusive development” for “lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) and other vulnerable groups,” as memorialized by a Ukrainian USAID-offshoot website that for now remains in tact as a curious relic of the past. The cultural and organizational shift of the Second Trump Administration toward aggressively rooting out these kinds of programs is abundantly clear.

And so what to make of this shift? USAID has been effectively shuttered as an independent agency, with its surviving operations said to be folded into the State Department. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has assured that US foreign “aid” programs will indeed continue in some form, albeit with more direct political oversight from presidential appointees, and a mandate to more strictly abide by the Administration’s political directives.

The shift, then, is probably best understood not as an abandonment of US intent to engage in “soft power” initiatives, but a cultural and political reformulation of those initiatives. It isn’t hard to envision a bureaucratically overhauled version of USAID under State Department auspices that continues to employ “aid” as a means of projecting US “soft power” — just without the culturally liberal NGO fluff that has come to comprise such a laughably outsized share of the “aid” generously provided. Perhaps the scope of the new US “soft power” will indeed shrink somewhat under Republican command, as the sorts of people drawn to this line of work have long disproportionately been liberal do-gooders ensconced within the liberally-oriented NGO complex. But “soft power” projection could also just as easily expand, albeit with a slightly “harder” edge, depending on what the overarching US foreign policy objectives are set out to be.

Although the significance of the infamous “Project 2025” manifesto was overblown by Democratic operatives running out of ideas, the document does provide some insights into the mechanics of prospective Republican governance. There is even a full section on USAID, written by the agency’s former administrator under the First Trump Administration. The section reads:

The next conservative Administration will have a unique opportunity to realign U.S. foreign assistance with American national interests and the principles of good governance and more accurately reflect the U.S. taxpayer’s unmatched charitable desire to help those in need. It can build on a strong baseline of conservative reforms undertaken by the Trump Administration to counter Communist China’s strategy of world domination. However, this will require that bold steps are taken on Day One to undo the gross misuse of foreign aid by the current Administration to promote a radical ideology that is politically divisive at home and harms our global standing.

One could thus imagine an overhaul of US “foreign aid” that does not abandon the proposition that US “soft power” can be deployed across the world to advance various US objectives, but rather simply aligns it more with contemporary right-wing cultural and geopolitical tendencies. And if one does seek to project US “soft power,” it would probably be wise to jettison the clownish LGBTQIA+ fluff anyway, which is unlikely to have ever been the most naturally appealing top-down political project in much of the world — not least in Eastern Europe. It’s also probably implausible that there was ever much indigenous clamoring for similar efforts in the nation of Colombia, where it really is true that in 2021, the US State Department provided a $25,000 grant for “transgender representation in opera.” There might even be an argument that these goofy programs hinder the projection of US soft power, as they foist rather baroque and alien cultural fixations on unsuspecting foreign populaces, under the aegis of the US government, and thus could lead to a kind of blowback that is adverse to US hegemonic interests. A resurgence of “traditional values” or “faith-based” initiatives of the variety that flourished during the George W. Bush Administration could instead be forthcoming; Trump has already signed an Executive Order to “empower faith-based entities.”

This revamped right-wing conception of “foreign aid” would obviously not be compatible with bygone USAID efforts to fund groups such as @DonbassQueer, which included “educational events for teenagers” entitled “They/Them.” My guess would be that if you put a gun to the head of even the most effete liberal, they’d have trouble stifling dismissive laughter when told that such a US-funded program really did exist:

Scaling down, streamlining, and revamping US “foreign aid” to do away with the extraneous liberal identity nonsense is not necessarily tantamount to any intrinsic repudiation of US “foreign aid.” At core, it’s more likely a bureaucratic and political reorganization of US “foreign aid” provisions, in line with what Republicans tend to agree is the overriding imperative of countering “Communist China’s strategy of world domination.” And if that’s the civilizational-scale policy goal, it will probably require more sketchy “aid,” not less.

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