The National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington-based nonprofit funded largely by the US Congress, has become the first group to be banned in Russia under a law against “undesirable” international nongovernmental organisations.



According to its website, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) is “dedicated to the growth and strengthening of democratic institutions around the world” and has funded local non-governmental organisations in more than 90 countries. But in a statement on Tuesday, the prosecutor general’s office said it “poses a threat to the constitutional order of the Russian Federation and the defensive capability and security of the government”.

“Using Russian commercial and noncommercial organisations under its control, the National Endowment for Democracy participated in work to declare the results of election campaigns illegitimate, organise political actions intended to influence decisions made by the authorities, and discredit service in Russia’s armed forces,” the statement said.

Under legislation signed by president Vladimir Putin in May, the Russian authorities can shut down “undesirable” NGOs without a court order if the prosecutor general determines they pose a threat to national security. The law’s vague phrasings mean foreign companies could also be shut down, although it primarily seems directed at NGOs.

Lawmakers have proposed that groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Carnegie Moscow Center and Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights organisation, be banned under the law, but NED is the first to be declared undesirable.

Russia has had a law against “foreign agents” – local NGOs that receive funding from abroad to carry out “political” activities – on the books since 2012, but the latest legislation has marked an expansion in the authorities’ scrutiny of democracy and human rights advocates. The MacArthur Foundation, an American NGO that supports academic and human rights initiatives, said last week it would cease its activities in Russia after legislators put it on a “patriotic stop list” of foreign NGOs.

A number of Russian NGOs have recently fallen victim to the foreign agents law. Russian telecoms tycoon Dmitry Zimin was forced in July to close his Dynasty Foundation, which gave grants to scientists and graduate students, after it was declared a foreign agent. Perm-36, which administered Russia’s only fully preserved Soviet-era gulag camp, has been fighting its designation as a foreign agent label in court.

The increased scrutiny of NGOs has come amid a deterioration of relations with the West after a pro-Western government came to power in Kiev last year. Putin, a former KGB officer, told security officials in March that western intelligence agencies use NGOs to “discredit the authorities and destabilise the internal situation in Russia”.

NED has long been demonised by Russian officials and state media. State news agency RIA Novosti claimed in an article earlier this month that NED invested $14 million in the “Ukrainian project” that culminated in the Euromaidan mass protests in 2014, which ousted president Viktor Yanukovych.

“The radicals and rioters got the money where such suspicious people usually get it, in Washington. As it turns out, the National Endowment for Democracy paid for the cookies,” the news agency said, referring to a December 2013 incident in which assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland handed out cookies to demonstrators. Russian state media later went so far as to claim that protestors were fed drug-laced tea to make them more aggressive.

While NED and USAID, along with eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Ukrainian organisations advocating European-style reforms, NED’s alleged investment of $14m could not be confirmed.

At the same time, the Euromaidan protests received massive public support as hundreds of thousands of people protested Yanukovych’s notoriously corrupt government and demanded greater integration with Europe. The size of the demonstrations increased exponentially after riot police attempted to clear the protestors with sometimes brutal methods.