With the United States effectively abandoning its decades-long international development mission, Russia is positioning itself to capture the resulting influence vacuum through the creation of its foreign aid powerhouse modelled directly on the now-defunct USAID.
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The pivot comes at a critical juncture in global geopolitics, as the Trump administration’s July 1 decision to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development has left a massive gap in international development assistance that Moscow appears eager to exploit.
Head of Russia’s foreign aid and cultural outreach agency Rossotrudnichestvo, Yevgeny Primakov, revealed the ambitious plans in an interview with state-controlled RBC news outlet published July 8. The timing suggests Russia has been closely monitoring America’s retreat from global development work and is moving quickly to capitalise on the opportunity.
“We are counting on the next iteration of our agency,” Primakov said, confirming that Russia’s Foreign Ministry is drafting legislation to establish a formal framework for international development efforts. The proposed agency would mirror key aspects of USAID, which had served as both America’s chief foreign aid vehicle and a cornerstone of Washington’s soft power strategy for decades.
The irony is palpable: Russia, which expelled USAID from its territory in 2012 over accusations of domestic interference, now seeks to replicate the very model it once rejected. Moscow had specifically accused the American agency of meddling in Russian affairs through support for election monitoring and civil society groups.
Primakov’s comments highlight both ambition and pragmatism about Russia’s global development aspirations. While acknowledging the scale of the challenge, he suggested Moscow would be content to compete with smaller players initially, citing Finland’s development agency as a more realistic benchmark than the former USAID behemoth.
The Russian official outlined significant operational challenges facing any such expansion, including limited funding, rising logistics costs, and the burden of international sanctions. Rossotrudnichestvo’s budget has grown from 4.2 billion rubles in 2020 to 5.5 billion rubles today, but only about 25% is available for actual programming, with the rest consumed by administrative costs across more than 80 overseas offices.
Current Russian development efforts remain modest by international standards, including distributing roughly 140,000 educational and literary books annually to libraries and universities abroad, plus maintaining Russian military gravesites in countries like Cyprus and Serbia.
The stakes are considerable. USAID had been instrumental in supporting civil society projects and independent media across Eastern Europe, while also backing organisations exiled from Russia and Belarus. In Ukraine alone, the agency provided $2.6 billion in humanitarian aid following Russia’s 2022 invasion, plus $5 billion in development assistance and over $30 billion in direct budget support to Kyiv.
The original story by Anna Fratsyvir can be found here.
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