Outsourcing Social Policy, Controlling Civil Society: Russia’s Presidential Grants Fund
Sergei Tikhonov and Ksenia Zinder
November 28, 2025
Academic policy Paper Series, no. 16, November 2025
Introduction
Nonprofit organizations contribute to social development, the protection of human rights, and the strengthening of civil society. By pursuing the common good instead of being guided by the profit motive, they can focus on specific issues through collective action by individuals and organizations, grassroots initiatives, and civic engagement.
In democratic regimes, various funding mechanisms exist to support and expand their capabilities, such as international aid, government funding in the form of grants and subsidies, private funding subsidized through tax deductions, and corporate social responsibility.
The activities of NGOs in authoritarian regimes are structured differently than they are in liberal-democratic ones. They cannot freely promote collective action because it is rightly seen by authoritarian regimes as a potential threat to their authority, and thereby, their existence. Solidarity, civic awareness, and organized political pressure on the authorities are the main risks that such regimes perceive.
However, authoritarian regimes still need NGOs. They try to shift issues that are not critical to the state to civil society while also keeping collective action from spreading. To accomplish this, they establish state support funds and restrict foreign and private funding.
Russia is no exception. Historically, civil society activity has been constantly subjected to pressure from the state. Russian NGOs may be labeled as foreign agents, with limited rights under the amendments to the law on NGOs that were accepted in June 2012. Since 2017, state support for NGOs has been consolidated under the Presidential Grants Fund.
Despite concerns that the Fund could become a tool for promoting the state’s ideological agenda, “PGF prioritizes funding to address critical social needs, focusing on disabled children, orphans, substance abuse and reforming the medical field.”1
Toepler et al. (2020), using an organizational perspective on civil society, emphasize the importance of differentiating civil society organizations by distinguishing between those that perform service delivery functions and those that engage in advocacy activities. Repression by authoritarian states targets only the latter, while the state delegates social assistance provision to the former and provides them with support.
We look at the state’s aim to restrict NGOs’ activities, assist socially conscious organizations, and direct them toward state goals. We demonstrate how the Russian government uses both rewards and penalties to try to establish the bounds of what is acceptable and keep NGOs within these.
Our analysis reveals a nuanced picture of state-NGO relations in contemporary Russia. Among Presidential Grants Fund recipients, a small group of the most trusted and heavily supported organizations has emerged, to which the state can delegate some of its functions, such as social support or assistance to groups affected by coronavirus. While the Fund serves as the primary actor in state funding distribution, it does not control all NGO financing, as the third sector continues developing alternative fundraising mechanisms through private and corporate donations.
Nonprofit organizations contribute to social development, the protection of human rights, and the strengthening of civil society. By pursuing the common good instead of being guided by the profit motive, they can focus on specific issues through collective action by individuals and organizations, grassroots initiatives, and civic engagement.
In democratic regimes, various funding mechanisms exist to support and expand their capabilities, such as international aid, government funding in the form of grants and subsidies, private funding subsidized through tax deductions, and corporate social responsibility.
The activities of NGOs in authoritarian regimes are structured differently than they are in liberal-democratic ones. They cannot freely promote collective action because it is rightly seen by authoritarian regimes as a potential threat to their authority, and thereby, their existence. Solidarity, civic awareness, and organized political pressure on the authorities are the main risks that such regimes perceive.
However, authoritarian regimes still need NGOs. They try to shift issues that are not critical to the state to civil society while also keeping collective action from spreading. To accomplish this, they establish state support funds and restrict foreign and private funding.
Russia is no exception. Historically, civil society activity has been constantly subjected to pressure from the state. Russian NGOs may be labeled as foreign agents, with limited rights under the amendments to the law on NGOs that were accepted in June 2012. Since 2017, state support for NGOs has been consolidated under the Presidential Grants Fund.
Despite concerns that the Fund could become a tool for promoting the state’s ideological agenda, “PGF prioritizes funding to address critical social needs, focusing on disabled children, orphans, substance abuse and reforming the medical field.”1
Toepler et al. (2020), using an organizational perspective on civil society, emphasize the importance of differentiating civil society organizations by distinguishing between those that perform service delivery functions and those that engage in advocacy activities. Repression by authoritarian states targets only the latter, while the state delegates social assistance provision to the former and provides them with support.
We look at the state’s aim to restrict NGOs’ activities, assist socially conscious organizations, and direct them toward state goals. We demonstrate how the Russian government uses both rewards and penalties to try to establish the bounds of what is acceptable and keep NGOs within these.
Our analysis reveals a nuanced picture of state-NGO relations in contemporary Russia. Among Presidential Grants Fund recipients, a small group of the most trusted and heavily supported organizations has emerged, to which the state can delegate some of its functions, such as social support or assistance to groups affected by coronavirus. While the Fund serves as the primary actor in state funding distribution, it does not control all NGO financing, as the third sector continues developing alternative fundraising mechanisms through private and corporate donations.
Historical Context
From the beginning of civil society discussions under Putin’s government, nonprofit organizations have been separated into two categories: (1) those deserving support because they address social problems (later formalized as “socially oriented nonprofit organizations”), and (2) those that primarily lobby for their Western donors’ interests. The latter group is portrayed in vague terms, with the acceptance of any foreign grants automatically viewed as a potential threat and an attempt at political lobbying by a foreign government. This threat was eventually formalized in legislation restricting foreign funding.
This dichotomy is clear in Vladimir Putin’s 2004 Address to the Federal Assembly, in which he noted that thousands of nongovernmental organizations work constructively in Russia. Supporting them would contribute to developing civil society institutions, ultimately enabling the transfer of social problem-solving functions to the nongovernmental sector—functions that the state should not, cannot, or does not want to effectively handle. He contrasted these socially-oriented organizations with public organizations from which he saw no benefit, since they focus only on obtaining grants, particularly from foreign donors.2
The idea of creating budget funds to provide grant financing for Russian nongovernmental organizations was proposed by the Russian economist and expert Alexander Auzan during a meeting of the Council for Promoting the Development of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights with Vladimir Putin on July 20, 2005.3 According to Auzan, nonprofit organizations lacked the ability to overcome bureaucratic barriers and obtain state funding, despite having a deep understanding of the problems they address, and greater flexibility to solve them more effectively than the state can. Putin acknowledged the necessity of creating budgetary or other forms of funding to support these kinds of organizations. When asked about the possibility of foreign financing for NGOs, he stressed that he finds foreign financing of political activities inside Russia unacceptable, but did not extend this restriction to the nonprofit sector as whole.
The following year, 2006, saw the first presidential grants competition for the development of civil society institutions. Over the period from 2006 to 2016, 11,467 presidential grants were awarded, totaling 22.6 billion rubles (approximately $0.62 billion).4 In the first competition of 2006, the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation served as the only body overseeing the grantmaking process. Between 2007 and 2016, the number of grant operators expanded to 9 organizations, which at various times included the following organizations:
Each of these organizations had its own thematic focus for the grants it independently distributed through them. This system was criticized for not being transparent enough without any unified application evaluation criteria to prevent favoritism.6
As a result of this criticism, the Presidential Grants Fund was established on April 3, 2017, to consolidate this fragmented system and provide grants from the President of the Russian Federation to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations that develop civil society institutions and implement socially significant projects and such as those promoting human rights and civil liberties.7 Seven public organizations that had been among the former grant operators became founding members of the new Fund.
The presidential grants system was developed simultaneously along with legislation restricting the activity of NGOs with foreign roots or funding. This formalized Putin’s concerns that foreign NGOs were attempting to influence politics in Russia. In 2006, amendments were made to the Federal Law on Nonprofit Organizations requiring all foreign NGOs with branches or representative offices on Russian territory to register with the Ministry of Justice, outlining the organization’s goals and objectives within the country.8 If these goals and objectives were deemed threatening to the state, registration might be denied, thereby prohibiting the NGO’s activities.
The next step was the introduction of amendments to the federal law on NGOs in 2012, establishing the status of “foreign agent” for Russian organizations that receive funding from abroad and engage in what is interpreted as political activity.9 In 2015, the law on “undesirable organizations” was adopted, allowing authorities to ban foreign and international organizations whose activities are deemed to pose a threat to Russia’s constitutional order, defense capabilities, or state security.10
The consolidation of multiple grant operators into a single fund, occurring precisely as foreign funding became increasingly inaccessible, raised concerns that state monopolization of the third sector would now become concentrated in the hands of a single operator, allowing for complete government control over NGO funding. Critics argued that the purpose of “presidential” money was to “hook NGOs on state financing, tame them, and transform them from critics into collaborators.”11
In response to this criticism, Presidential Grants Fund Director Ilya Chukalin, in his interview preceding the first presidential grants competition, in April 2017, gave assurances that organizations with “foreign agent” status would retain the right to participate in competitions.12 Indeed, from 2017 to 2020, NGOs with foreign agent status did receive grants. The number of winners was never higher than three per year, though, and in recent years, they have no longer participated at all. This confirms initial concerns that organizations that are engaged in what the state considers political activity and have foreign funding are deprived of the opportunity to receive presidential grants.
On the other hand, according to Debra Javeline and Sarah Lindemann-Komarova’s research, only a small proportion of NGOs ever received foreign funding.13 The number of such organizations peaked in 2009, at just 7%. A much bigger problem for NGOs has been the lack of funding overall, and this was the problem the Presidential Grants Fund was intended to address.
The Presidential Grants Fund operates through a competitive grant application system. Since its establishment, it has been the sole operator of state support for nongovernmental nonprofit organizations in Russia. Every year, it runs two regular grant contests. Any nonprofit nongovernmental organization that has been registered for more than a year can submit a project application describing its goals and objectives, target groups, budget, and planned activities. Political parties and government-affiliated organizations are not allowed to participate in these contests. From its establishment in 2017 up through 2025, 45,215 NGOs have participated in the Fund’s contests, submitting 176,404 grant applications in the following categories:
The spread of coronavirus and lockdowns forced the Presidential Fund to rely on NGOs in support of medical workers and other high-risk groups affected by the pandemic by organizing an additional contest. It was conducted after the two regular contests had already concluded, and received additional funding of 3 billion rubles ($41.5 million).15 This was the first special contest, introducing a new mechanism of using the Presidential Grants Fund as a proxy for the state to allocate money to NGOs for the rapid resolution of social problems. Later, we will demonstrate how the two types of contests differ from one another.
The same approach of engaging NGOs to address crisis situations through special contests was used in 2022 after the onset of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. NGOs were also supported by 2 billion rubles ($27.8 million) in additional funding.16 This contest was aimed at “supporting compatriots—including aid in Donbas and newly liberated territories—as well as providing social support to those arriving from these regions,” and other groups who suffered from the very beginning of the war.17
In 2025, two special contests have already been announced, marking a notable shift in the Fund’s approach. Unlike previous crisis-response competitions that addressed extraordinary challenges, these new contests target more localized political priorities: supporting projects solely in the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia (both of which have been de facto run by separatists since 2008, though they remain de jure parts of the Republic of Georgia).
In 2021, an amendment to the law regulating the allocation of presidential grants was made, allowing the Fund to provide grants by decision of the president to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations of which the Fund is the founder, without holding a public contest.18 As a result, several additional mechanisms for distributing state support to NGOs through the Presidential Grants Fund have been introduced, almost doubling the level of state support and creating a comprehensive infrastructure for disbursement through the Fund, while further expanding the Fund’s reach and presence across various areas of the third sector.
To address regional imbalances and support foundations located outside Moscow, in 2021 the Fund began distributing additional money among regional grant operators, thereby co-financing local presidential grant competitions. Regional grant operators solicit applications from local NGOs and combine them into a consolidated regional application, which the Presidential Fund then reviews.
Another mechanism was involved, turning subsidiary funds for specific funding streams that were previously supported within the Presidential Grants Fund into separate subsidiary funds. Starting in 2021, projects in culture, the arts, and creative industries were no longer supported directly through the Presidential Grants Fund, and a separate Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives was created to finance them. Likewise, the Presidential Fund for Environmental and Conservation Projects was established in 2025. Environmental protection and animal welfare grant applications are still accepted by the main Fund as of 2025, but the creation of a new fund will dramatically increase the total amounts allocated to these types of projects.
Data Overview
This analysis is based primarily on data from the Presidential Grants Fund’s official website, where all grant applications and competition results are published in accordance with the Fund’s commitment to openness and transparency.19 This information was compiled into a dataset by the open data platform To Be Precise.20
The dataset includes comprehensive information on all applications from all contests from the Fund’s establishment in 2017 through 2025, including their status (approved or rejected), details about the applicant NGOs, and project descriptions. The dataset contains 176,404 applications from 45,215 unique organizations across regular contests (first and second annual competitions) and special contests introduced in response to extraordinary circumstances.
Key variables include requested and awarded funding amounts, geographic distribution across Russian regions, project categories, and organizational characteristics. The unit of analysis varies depending on the research question, examining both individual applications and organizational-level patterns over time.
Regional funding distribution data was obtained from the Presidential Grants Fund, detailing the amounts allocated to each of Russia’s 79 regions annually from 2021 through 2024. This data provides total allocation figures per region but does not include details on how funds were distributed among individual NGOs within each region.
The analysis incorporates data from the Registry on Nonprofit Organizations (Реестр некоммерческих организаций) held by the Ministry of Justice,21 with which all nonprofit organizations are obligated to register in order to operate within the territory of the Russian Federation. This dataset contains 220,092 observations from 1983 through June 2025, with each entry representing a unique organization and its corresponding registration date. The data has been cleaned to remove duplicates and entries with data errors.
As a data source for NGOs engaged in addressing social problems and thus constituting the primary potential participants in presidential grant competitions, this analysis also utilized the Registry of Socially Oriented Nonprofit Organizations (Реестр социально ориентированных некоммерческих организаций) maintained by the Ministry of Economic Development since 2021.22 Whereas the first register contains information about all nonprofit organizations, the second register specifically contains information about nonprofits that engage in charitable activities. An organization may be listed in only the first registry or in both. As of July 17, 2025, the second registry comprises 49,670 organizations and specifies the date of their inclusion as well as the basis upon which each organization acquired this designation.
From the beginning of civil society discussions under Putin’s government, nonprofit organizations have been separated into two categories: (1) those deserving support because they address social problems (later formalized as “socially oriented nonprofit organizations”), and (2) those that primarily lobby for their Western donors’ interests. The latter group is portrayed in vague terms, with the acceptance of any foreign grants automatically viewed as a potential threat and an attempt at political lobbying by a foreign government. This threat was eventually formalized in legislation restricting foreign funding.
This dichotomy is clear in Vladimir Putin’s 2004 Address to the Federal Assembly, in which he noted that thousands of nongovernmental organizations work constructively in Russia. Supporting them would contribute to developing civil society institutions, ultimately enabling the transfer of social problem-solving functions to the nongovernmental sector—functions that the state should not, cannot, or does not want to effectively handle. He contrasted these socially-oriented organizations with public organizations from which he saw no benefit, since they focus only on obtaining grants, particularly from foreign donors.2
The idea of creating budget funds to provide grant financing for Russian nongovernmental organizations was proposed by the Russian economist and expert Alexander Auzan during a meeting of the Council for Promoting the Development of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights with Vladimir Putin on July 20, 2005.3 According to Auzan, nonprofit organizations lacked the ability to overcome bureaucratic barriers and obtain state funding, despite having a deep understanding of the problems they address, and greater flexibility to solve them more effectively than the state can. Putin acknowledged the necessity of creating budgetary or other forms of funding to support these kinds of organizations. When asked about the possibility of foreign financing for NGOs, he stressed that he finds foreign financing of political activities inside Russia unacceptable, but did not extend this restriction to the nonprofit sector as whole.
The following year, 2006, saw the first presidential grants competition for the development of civil society institutions. Over the period from 2006 to 2016, 11,467 presidential grants were awarded, totaling 22.6 billion rubles (approximately $0.62 billion).4 In the first competition of 2006, the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation served as the only body overseeing the grantmaking process. Between 2007 and 2016, the number of grant operators expanded to 9 organizations, which at various times included the following organizations:
- League of Health of the Nation
- National Charitable Foundation
- The Knowledge society
- Russian Youth Union
- Civil Dignity
- Institute for Social, Economic, and Political Research
- Institute for Civil Society Problems
- Union of Pensioners of Russia
- Union of Women of Russia
- Russian Union of Rectors
- Perspektiva Foundation
- Pokrov Charitable Foundation5
Each of these organizations had its own thematic focus for the grants it independently distributed through them. This system was criticized for not being transparent enough without any unified application evaluation criteria to prevent favoritism.6
As a result of this criticism, the Presidential Grants Fund was established on April 3, 2017, to consolidate this fragmented system and provide grants from the President of the Russian Federation to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations that develop civil society institutions and implement socially significant projects and such as those promoting human rights and civil liberties.7 Seven public organizations that had been among the former grant operators became founding members of the new Fund.
The presidential grants system was developed simultaneously along with legislation restricting the activity of NGOs with foreign roots or funding. This formalized Putin’s concerns that foreign NGOs were attempting to influence politics in Russia. In 2006, amendments were made to the Federal Law on Nonprofit Organizations requiring all foreign NGOs with branches or representative offices on Russian territory to register with the Ministry of Justice, outlining the organization’s goals and objectives within the country.8 If these goals and objectives were deemed threatening to the state, registration might be denied, thereby prohibiting the NGO’s activities.
The next step was the introduction of amendments to the federal law on NGOs in 2012, establishing the status of “foreign agent” for Russian organizations that receive funding from abroad and engage in what is interpreted as political activity.9 In 2015, the law on “undesirable organizations” was adopted, allowing authorities to ban foreign and international organizations whose activities are deemed to pose a threat to Russia’s constitutional order, defense capabilities, or state security.10
The consolidation of multiple grant operators into a single fund, occurring precisely as foreign funding became increasingly inaccessible, raised concerns that state monopolization of the third sector would now become concentrated in the hands of a single operator, allowing for complete government control over NGO funding. Critics argued that the purpose of “presidential” money was to “hook NGOs on state financing, tame them, and transform them from critics into collaborators.”11
In response to this criticism, Presidential Grants Fund Director Ilya Chukalin, in his interview preceding the first presidential grants competition, in April 2017, gave assurances that organizations with “foreign agent” status would retain the right to participate in competitions.12 Indeed, from 2017 to 2020, NGOs with foreign agent status did receive grants. The number of winners was never higher than three per year, though, and in recent years, they have no longer participated at all. This confirms initial concerns that organizations that are engaged in what the state considers political activity and have foreign funding are deprived of the opportunity to receive presidential grants.
On the other hand, according to Debra Javeline and Sarah Lindemann-Komarova’s research, only a small proportion of NGOs ever received foreign funding.13 The number of such organizations peaked in 2009, at just 7%. A much bigger problem for NGOs has been the lack of funding overall, and this was the problem the Presidential Grants Fund was intended to address.
The Presidential Grants Fund operates through a competitive grant application system. Since its establishment, it has been the sole operator of state support for nongovernmental nonprofit organizations in Russia. Every year, it runs two regular grant contests. Any nonprofit nongovernmental organization that has been registered for more than a year can submit a project application describing its goals and objectives, target groups, budget, and planned activities. Political parties and government-affiliated organizations are not allowed to participate in these contests. From its establishment in 2017 up through 2025, 45,215 NGOs have participated in the Fund’s contests, submitting 176,404 grant applications in the following categories:
- social services
- healthcare and promotion of healthy lifestyles
- support for families, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood
- youth projects
- science and educational projects
- preservation of historical memory
- protection of human and civil rights and liberties, including prisoners’ rights
- environmental protection and animal welfare
- inter-ethnic and inter-religious cooperation
- development of public diplomacy and support for the Russian diaspora
- development of civil society institutions
- arts and culture, including support for talented youth14
The spread of coronavirus and lockdowns forced the Presidential Fund to rely on NGOs in support of medical workers and other high-risk groups affected by the pandemic by organizing an additional contest. It was conducted after the two regular contests had already concluded, and received additional funding of 3 billion rubles ($41.5 million).15 This was the first special contest, introducing a new mechanism of using the Presidential Grants Fund as a proxy for the state to allocate money to NGOs for the rapid resolution of social problems. Later, we will demonstrate how the two types of contests differ from one another.
The same approach of engaging NGOs to address crisis situations through special contests was used in 2022 after the onset of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. NGOs were also supported by 2 billion rubles ($27.8 million) in additional funding.16 This contest was aimed at “supporting compatriots—including aid in Donbas and newly liberated territories—as well as providing social support to those arriving from these regions,” and other groups who suffered from the very beginning of the war.17
In 2025, two special contests have already been announced, marking a notable shift in the Fund’s approach. Unlike previous crisis-response competitions that addressed extraordinary challenges, these new contests target more localized political priorities: supporting projects solely in the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia (both of which have been de facto run by separatists since 2008, though they remain de jure parts of the Republic of Georgia).
In 2021, an amendment to the law regulating the allocation of presidential grants was made, allowing the Fund to provide grants by decision of the president to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations of which the Fund is the founder, without holding a public contest.18 As a result, several additional mechanisms for distributing state support to NGOs through the Presidential Grants Fund have been introduced, almost doubling the level of state support and creating a comprehensive infrastructure for disbursement through the Fund, while further expanding the Fund’s reach and presence across various areas of the third sector.
To address regional imbalances and support foundations located outside Moscow, in 2021 the Fund began distributing additional money among regional grant operators, thereby co-financing local presidential grant competitions. Regional grant operators solicit applications from local NGOs and combine them into a consolidated regional application, which the Presidential Fund then reviews.
Another mechanism was involved, turning subsidiary funds for specific funding streams that were previously supported within the Presidential Grants Fund into separate subsidiary funds. Starting in 2021, projects in culture, the arts, and creative industries were no longer supported directly through the Presidential Grants Fund, and a separate Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives was created to finance them. Likewise, the Presidential Fund for Environmental and Conservation Projects was established in 2025. Environmental protection and animal welfare grant applications are still accepted by the main Fund as of 2025, but the creation of a new fund will dramatically increase the total amounts allocated to these types of projects.
Data Overview
This analysis is based primarily on data from the Presidential Grants Fund’s official website, where all grant applications and competition results are published in accordance with the Fund’s commitment to openness and transparency.19 This information was compiled into a dataset by the open data platform To Be Precise.20
The dataset includes comprehensive information on all applications from all contests from the Fund’s establishment in 2017 through 2025, including their status (approved or rejected), details about the applicant NGOs, and project descriptions. The dataset contains 176,404 applications from 45,215 unique organizations across regular contests (first and second annual competitions) and special contests introduced in response to extraordinary circumstances.
Key variables include requested and awarded funding amounts, geographic distribution across Russian regions, project categories, and organizational characteristics. The unit of analysis varies depending on the research question, examining both individual applications and organizational-level patterns over time.
Regional funding distribution data was obtained from the Presidential Grants Fund, detailing the amounts allocated to each of Russia’s 79 regions annually from 2021 through 2024. This data provides total allocation figures per region but does not include details on how funds were distributed among individual NGOs within each region.
The analysis incorporates data from the Registry on Nonprofit Organizations (Реестр некоммерческих организаций) held by the Ministry of Justice,21 with which all nonprofit organizations are obligated to register in order to operate within the territory of the Russian Federation. This dataset contains 220,092 observations from 1983 through June 2025, with each entry representing a unique organization and its corresponding registration date. The data has been cleaned to remove duplicates and entries with data errors.
As a data source for NGOs engaged in addressing social problems and thus constituting the primary potential participants in presidential grant competitions, this analysis also utilized the Registry of Socially Oriented Nonprofit Organizations (Реестр социально ориентированных некоммерческих организаций) maintained by the Ministry of Economic Development since 2021.22 Whereas the first register contains information about all nonprofit organizations, the second register specifically contains information about nonprofits that engage in charitable activities. An organization may be listed in only the first registry or in both. As of July 17, 2025, the second registry comprises 49,670 organizations and specifies the date of their inclusion as well as the basis upon which each organization acquired this designation.
Historical Context
From the beginning of civil society discussions under Putin’s government, nonprofit organizations have been separated into two categories: (1) those deserving support because they address social problems (later formalized as “socially oriented nonprofit organizations”), and (2) those that primarily lobby for their Western donors’ interests. The latter group is portrayed in vague terms, with the acceptance of any foreign grants automatically viewed as a potential threat and an attempt at political lobbying by a foreign government. This threat was eventually formalized in legislation restricting foreign funding.
This dichotomy is clear in Vladimir Putin’s 2004 Address to the Federal Assembly, in which he noted that thousands of nongovernmental organizations work constructively in Russia. Supporting them would contribute to developing civil society institutions, ultimately enabling the transfer of social problem-solving functions to the nongovernmental sector—functions that the state should not, cannot, or does not want to effectively handle. He contrasted these socially-oriented organizations with public organizations from which he saw no benefit, since they focus only on obtaining grants, particularly from foreign donors.2
The idea of creating budget funds to provide grant financing for Russian nongovernmental organizations was proposed by the Russian economist and expert Alexander Auzan during a meeting of the Council for Promoting the Development of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights with Vladimir Putin on July 20, 2005.3 According to Auzan, nonprofit organizations lacked the ability to overcome bureaucratic barriers and obtain state funding, despite having a deep understanding of the problems they address, and greater flexibility to solve them more effectively than the state can. Putin acknowledged the necessity of creating budgetary or other forms of funding to support these kinds of organizations. When asked about the possibility of foreign financing for NGOs, he stressed that he finds foreign financing of political activities inside Russia unacceptable, but did not extend this restriction to the nonprofit sector as whole.
The following year, 2006, saw the first presidential grants competition for the development of civil society institutions. Over the period from 2006 to 2016, 11,467 presidential grants were awarded, totaling 22.6 billion rubles (approximately $0.62 billion).4 In the first competition of 2006, the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation served as the only body overseeing the grantmaking process. Between 2007 and 2016, the number of grant operators expanded to 9 organizations, which at various times included the following organizations:
Each of these organizations had its own thematic focus for the grants it independently distributed through them. This system was criticized for not being transparent enough without any unified application evaluation criteria to prevent favoritism.6
As a result of this criticism, the Presidential Grants Fund was established on April 3, 2017, to consolidate this fragmented system and provide grants from the President of the Russian Federation to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations that develop civil society institutions and implement socially significant projects and such as those promoting human rights and civil liberties.7 Seven public organizations that had been among the former grant operators became founding members of the new Fund.
The presidential grants system was developed simultaneously along with legislation restricting the activity of NGOs with foreign roots or funding. This formalized Putin’s concerns that foreign NGOs were attempting to influence politics in Russia. In 2006, amendments were made to the Federal Law on Nonprofit Organizations requiring all foreign NGOs with branches or representative offices on Russian territory to register with the Ministry of Justice, outlining the organization’s goals and objectives within the country.8 If these goals and objectives were deemed threatening to the state, registration might be denied, thereby prohibiting the NGO’s activities.
The next step was the introduction of amendments to the federal law on NGOs in 2012, establishing the status of “foreign agent” for Russian organizations that receive funding from abroad and engage in what is interpreted as political activity.9 In 2015, the law on “undesirable organizations” was adopted, allowing authorities to ban foreign and international organizations whose activities are deemed to pose a threat to Russia’s constitutional order, defense capabilities, or state security.10
The consolidation of multiple grant operators into a single fund, occurring precisely as foreign funding became increasingly inaccessible, raised concerns that state monopolization of the third sector would now become concentrated in the hands of a single operator, allowing for complete government control over NGO funding. Critics argued that the purpose of “presidential” money was to “hook NGOs on state financing, tame them, and transform them from critics into collaborators.”11
In response to this criticism, Presidential Grants Fund Director Ilya Chukalin, in his interview preceding the first presidential grants competition, in April 2017, gave assurances that organizations with “foreign agent” status would retain the right to participate in competitions.12 Indeed, from 2017 to 2020, NGOs with foreign agent status did receive grants. The number of winners was never higher than three per year, though, and in recent years, they have no longer participated at all. This confirms initial concerns that organizations that are engaged in what the state considers political activity and have foreign funding are deprived of the opportunity to receive presidential grants.
On the other hand, according to Debra Javeline and Sarah Lindemann-Komarova’s research, only a small proportion of NGOs ever received foreign funding.13 The number of such organizations peaked in 2009, at just 7%. A much bigger problem for NGOs has been the lack of funding overall, and this was the problem the Presidential Grants Fund was intended to address.
The Presidential Grants Fund operates through a competitive grant application system. Since its establishment, it has been the sole operator of state support for nongovernmental nonprofit organizations in Russia. Every year, it runs two regular grant contests. Any nonprofit nongovernmental organization that has been registered for more than a year can submit a project application describing its goals and objectives, target groups, budget, and planned activities. Political parties and government-affiliated organizations are not allowed to participate in these contests. From its establishment in 2017 up through 2025, 45,215 NGOs have participated in the Fund’s contests, submitting 176,404 grant applications in the following categories:
The spread of coronavirus and lockdowns forced the Presidential Fund to rely on NGOs in support of medical workers and other high-risk groups affected by the pandemic by organizing an additional contest. It was conducted after the two regular contests had already concluded, and received additional funding of 3 billion rubles ($41.5 million).15 This was the first special contest, introducing a new mechanism of using the Presidential Grants Fund as a proxy for the state to allocate money to NGOs for the rapid resolution of social problems. Later, we will demonstrate how the two types of contests differ from one another.
The same approach of engaging NGOs to address crisis situations through special contests was used in 2022 after the onset of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. NGOs were also supported by 2 billion rubles ($27.8 million) in additional funding.16 This contest was aimed at “supporting compatriots—including aid in Donbas and newly liberated territories—as well as providing social support to those arriving from these regions,” and other groups who suffered from the very beginning of the war.17
In 2025, two special contests have already been announced, marking a notable shift in the Fund’s approach. Unlike previous crisis-response competitions that addressed extraordinary challenges, these new contests target more localized political priorities: supporting projects solely in the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia (both of which have been de facto run by separatists since 2008, though they remain de jure parts of the Republic of Georgia).
In 2021, an amendment to the law regulating the allocation of presidential grants was made, allowing the Fund to provide grants by decision of the president to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations of which the Fund is the founder, without holding a public contest.18 As a result, several additional mechanisms for distributing state support to NGOs through the Presidential Grants Fund have been introduced, almost doubling the level of state support and creating a comprehensive infrastructure for disbursement through the Fund, while further expanding the Fund’s reach and presence across various areas of the third sector.
To address regional imbalances and support foundations located outside Moscow, in 2021 the Fund began distributing additional money among regional grant operators, thereby co-financing local presidential grant competitions. Regional grant operators solicit applications from local NGOs and combine them into a consolidated regional application, which the Presidential Fund then reviews.
Another mechanism was involved, turning subsidiary funds for specific funding streams that were previously supported within the Presidential Grants Fund into separate subsidiary funds. Starting in 2021, projects in culture, the arts, and creative industries were no longer supported directly through the Presidential Grants Fund, and a separate Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives was created to finance them. Likewise, the Presidential Fund for Environmental and Conservation Projects was established in 2025. Environmental protection and animal welfare grant applications are still accepted by the main Fund as of 2025, but the creation of a new fund will dramatically increase the total amounts allocated to these types of projects.
Data Overview
This analysis is based primarily on data from the Presidential Grants Fund’s official website, where all grant applications and competition results are published in accordance with the Fund’s commitment to openness and transparency.19 This information was compiled into a dataset by the open data platform To Be Precise.20
The dataset includes comprehensive information on all applications from all contests from the Fund’s establishment in 2017 through 2025, including their status (approved or rejected), details about the applicant NGOs, and project descriptions. The dataset contains 176,404 applications from 45,215 unique organizations across regular contests (first and second annual competitions) and special contests introduced in response to extraordinary circumstances.
Key variables include requested and awarded funding amounts, geographic distribution across Russian regions, project categories, and organizational characteristics. The unit of analysis varies depending on the research question, examining both individual applications and organizational-level patterns over time.
Regional funding distribution data was obtained from the Presidential Grants Fund, detailing the amounts allocated to each of Russia’s 79 regions annually from 2021 through 2024. This data provides total allocation figures per region but does not include details on how funds were distributed among individual NGOs within each region.
The analysis incorporates data from the Registry on Nonprofit Organizations (Реестр некоммерческих организаций) held by the Ministry of Justice,21 with which all nonprofit organizations are obligated to register in order to operate within the territory of the Russian Federation. This dataset contains 220,092 observations from 1983 through June 2025, with each entry representing a unique organization and its corresponding registration date. The data has been cleaned to remove duplicates and entries with data errors.
As a data source for NGOs engaged in addressing social problems and thus constituting the primary potential participants in presidential grant competitions, this analysis also utilized the Registry of Socially Oriented Nonprofit Organizations (Реестр социально ориентированных некоммерческих организаций) maintained by the Ministry of Economic Development since 2021.22 Whereas the first register contains information about all nonprofit organizations, the second register specifically contains information about nonprofits that engage in charitable activities. An organization may be listed in only the first registry or in both. As of July 17, 2025, the second registry comprises 49,670 organizations and specifies the date of their inclusion as well as the basis upon which each organization acquired this designation.
From the beginning of civil society discussions under Putin’s government, nonprofit organizations have been separated into two categories: (1) those deserving support because they address social problems (later formalized as “socially oriented nonprofit organizations”), and (2) those that primarily lobby for their Western donors’ interests. The latter group is portrayed in vague terms, with the acceptance of any foreign grants automatically viewed as a potential threat and an attempt at political lobbying by a foreign government. This threat was eventually formalized in legislation restricting foreign funding.
This dichotomy is clear in Vladimir Putin’s 2004 Address to the Federal Assembly, in which he noted that thousands of nongovernmental organizations work constructively in Russia. Supporting them would contribute to developing civil society institutions, ultimately enabling the transfer of social problem-solving functions to the nongovernmental sector—functions that the state should not, cannot, or does not want to effectively handle. He contrasted these socially-oriented organizations with public organizations from which he saw no benefit, since they focus only on obtaining grants, particularly from foreign donors.2
The idea of creating budget funds to provide grant financing for Russian nongovernmental organizations was proposed by the Russian economist and expert Alexander Auzan during a meeting of the Council for Promoting the Development of Civil Society Institutions and Human Rights with Vladimir Putin on July 20, 2005.3 According to Auzan, nonprofit organizations lacked the ability to overcome bureaucratic barriers and obtain state funding, despite having a deep understanding of the problems they address, and greater flexibility to solve them more effectively than the state can. Putin acknowledged the necessity of creating budgetary or other forms of funding to support these kinds of organizations. When asked about the possibility of foreign financing for NGOs, he stressed that he finds foreign financing of political activities inside Russia unacceptable, but did not extend this restriction to the nonprofit sector as whole.
The following year, 2006, saw the first presidential grants competition for the development of civil society institutions. Over the period from 2006 to 2016, 11,467 presidential grants were awarded, totaling 22.6 billion rubles (approximately $0.62 billion).4 In the first competition of 2006, the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation served as the only body overseeing the grantmaking process. Between 2007 and 2016, the number of grant operators expanded to 9 organizations, which at various times included the following organizations:
- League of Health of the Nation
- National Charitable Foundation
- The Knowledge society
- Russian Youth Union
- Civil Dignity
- Institute for Social, Economic, and Political Research
- Institute for Civil Society Problems
- Union of Pensioners of Russia
- Union of Women of Russia
- Russian Union of Rectors
- Perspektiva Foundation
- Pokrov Charitable Foundation5
Each of these organizations had its own thematic focus for the grants it independently distributed through them. This system was criticized for not being transparent enough without any unified application evaluation criteria to prevent favoritism.6
As a result of this criticism, the Presidential Grants Fund was established on April 3, 2017, to consolidate this fragmented system and provide grants from the President of the Russian Federation to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations that develop civil society institutions and implement socially significant projects and such as those promoting human rights and civil liberties.7 Seven public organizations that had been among the former grant operators became founding members of the new Fund.
The presidential grants system was developed simultaneously along with legislation restricting the activity of NGOs with foreign roots or funding. This formalized Putin’s concerns that foreign NGOs were attempting to influence politics in Russia. In 2006, amendments were made to the Federal Law on Nonprofit Organizations requiring all foreign NGOs with branches or representative offices on Russian territory to register with the Ministry of Justice, outlining the organization’s goals and objectives within the country.8 If these goals and objectives were deemed threatening to the state, registration might be denied, thereby prohibiting the NGO’s activities.
The next step was the introduction of amendments to the federal law on NGOs in 2012, establishing the status of “foreign agent” for Russian organizations that receive funding from abroad and engage in what is interpreted as political activity.9 In 2015, the law on “undesirable organizations” was adopted, allowing authorities to ban foreign and international organizations whose activities are deemed to pose a threat to Russia’s constitutional order, defense capabilities, or state security.10
The consolidation of multiple grant operators into a single fund, occurring precisely as foreign funding became increasingly inaccessible, raised concerns that state monopolization of the third sector would now become concentrated in the hands of a single operator, allowing for complete government control over NGO funding. Critics argued that the purpose of “presidential” money was to “hook NGOs on state financing, tame them, and transform them from critics into collaborators.”11
In response to this criticism, Presidential Grants Fund Director Ilya Chukalin, in his interview preceding the first presidential grants competition, in April 2017, gave assurances that organizations with “foreign agent” status would retain the right to participate in competitions.12 Indeed, from 2017 to 2020, NGOs with foreign agent status did receive grants. The number of winners was never higher than three per year, though, and in recent years, they have no longer participated at all. This confirms initial concerns that organizations that are engaged in what the state considers political activity and have foreign funding are deprived of the opportunity to receive presidential grants.
On the other hand, according to Debra Javeline and Sarah Lindemann-Komarova’s research, only a small proportion of NGOs ever received foreign funding.13 The number of such organizations peaked in 2009, at just 7%. A much bigger problem for NGOs has been the lack of funding overall, and this was the problem the Presidential Grants Fund was intended to address.
The Presidential Grants Fund operates through a competitive grant application system. Since its establishment, it has been the sole operator of state support for nongovernmental nonprofit organizations in Russia. Every year, it runs two regular grant contests. Any nonprofit nongovernmental organization that has been registered for more than a year can submit a project application describing its goals and objectives, target groups, budget, and planned activities. Political parties and government-affiliated organizations are not allowed to participate in these contests. From its establishment in 2017 up through 2025, 45,215 NGOs have participated in the Fund’s contests, submitting 176,404 grant applications in the following categories:
- social services
- healthcare and promotion of healthy lifestyles
- support for families, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood
- youth projects
- science and educational projects
- preservation of historical memory
- protection of human and civil rights and liberties, including prisoners’ rights
- environmental protection and animal welfare
- inter-ethnic and inter-religious cooperation
- development of public diplomacy and support for the Russian diaspora
- development of civil society institutions
- arts and culture, including support for talented youth14
The spread of coronavirus and lockdowns forced the Presidential Fund to rely on NGOs in support of medical workers and other high-risk groups affected by the pandemic by organizing an additional contest. It was conducted after the two regular contests had already concluded, and received additional funding of 3 billion rubles ($41.5 million).15 This was the first special contest, introducing a new mechanism of using the Presidential Grants Fund as a proxy for the state to allocate money to NGOs for the rapid resolution of social problems. Later, we will demonstrate how the two types of contests differ from one another.
The same approach of engaging NGOs to address crisis situations through special contests was used in 2022 after the onset of the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. NGOs were also supported by 2 billion rubles ($27.8 million) in additional funding.16 This contest was aimed at “supporting compatriots—including aid in Donbas and newly liberated territories—as well as providing social support to those arriving from these regions,” and other groups who suffered from the very beginning of the war.17
In 2025, two special contests have already been announced, marking a notable shift in the Fund’s approach. Unlike previous crisis-response competitions that addressed extraordinary challenges, these new contests target more localized political priorities: supporting projects solely in the Republic of Abkhazia and the Republic of South Ossetia (both of which have been de facto run by separatists since 2008, though they remain de jure parts of the Republic of Georgia).
In 2021, an amendment to the law regulating the allocation of presidential grants was made, allowing the Fund to provide grants by decision of the president to nongovernmental nonprofit organizations of which the Fund is the founder, without holding a public contest.18 As a result, several additional mechanisms for distributing state support to NGOs through the Presidential Grants Fund have been introduced, almost doubling the level of state support and creating a comprehensive infrastructure for disbursement through the Fund, while further expanding the Fund’s reach and presence across various areas of the third sector.
To address regional imbalances and support foundations located outside Moscow, in 2021 the Fund began distributing additional money among regional grant operators, thereby co-financing local presidential grant competitions. Regional grant operators solicit applications from local NGOs and combine them into a consolidated regional application, which the Presidential Fund then reviews.
Another mechanism was involved, turning subsidiary funds for specific funding streams that were previously supported within the Presidential Grants Fund into separate subsidiary funds. Starting in 2021, projects in culture, the arts, and creative industries were no longer supported directly through the Presidential Grants Fund, and a separate Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives was created to finance them. Likewise, the Presidential Fund for Environmental and Conservation Projects was established in 2025. Environmental protection and animal welfare grant applications are still accepted by the main Fund as of 2025, but the creation of a new fund will dramatically increase the total amounts allocated to these types of projects.
Data Overview
This analysis is based primarily on data from the Presidential Grants Fund’s official website, where all grant applications and competition results are published in accordance with the Fund’s commitment to openness and transparency.19 This information was compiled into a dataset by the open data platform To Be Precise.20
The dataset includes comprehensive information on all applications from all contests from the Fund’s establishment in 2017 through 2025, including their status (approved or rejected), details about the applicant NGOs, and project descriptions. The dataset contains 176,404 applications from 45,215 unique organizations across regular contests (first and second annual competitions) and special contests introduced in response to extraordinary circumstances.
Key variables include requested and awarded funding amounts, geographic distribution across Russian regions, project categories, and organizational characteristics. The unit of analysis varies depending on the research question, examining both individual applications and organizational-level patterns over time.
Regional funding distribution data was obtained from the Presidential Grants Fund, detailing the amounts allocated to each of Russia’s 79 regions annually from 2021 through 2024. This data provides total allocation figures per region but does not include details on how funds were distributed among individual NGOs within each region.
The analysis incorporates data from the Registry on Nonprofit Organizations (Реестр некоммерческих организаций) held by the Ministry of Justice,21 with which all nonprofit organizations are obligated to register in order to operate within the territory of the Russian Federation. This dataset contains 220,092 observations from 1983 through June 2025, with each entry representing a unique organization and its corresponding registration date. The data has been cleaned to remove duplicates and entries with data errors.
As a data source for NGOs engaged in addressing social problems and thus constituting the primary potential participants in presidential grant competitions, this analysis also utilized the Registry of Socially Oriented Nonprofit Organizations (Реестр социально ориентированных некоммерческих организаций) maintained by the Ministry of Economic Development since 2021.22 Whereas the first register contains information about all nonprofit organizations, the second register specifically contains information about nonprofits that engage in charitable activities. An organization may be listed in only the first registry or in both. As of July 17, 2025, the second registry comprises 49,670 organizations and specifies the date of their inclusion as well as the basis upon which each organization acquired this designation.
Fig 1 Total Funding Won by Year and Contest Type
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
This also reflects the growing number of participating NGOs, as organizations typically submit only one application per contest, with an average of 1.1 applications per organization. NGOs are allowed to submit multiple applications, but only one project per organization can receive funding, so most concentrate their efforts on preparing a single, strong application.
The combination of shrinking real funding and growing demand has created intensifying competition. While the volume of applications continues to grow or at least hold steady year on year, the number of winning applications has declined sharply, from over 4,400 in 2020 to fewer than 3,200 in 2025. To maintain meaningful grant award amounts despite the ruble’s depreciation, the Fund appears to have reduced the number of awards rather than spread the same ruble amount around more thinly. The win rate, which peaked at 23% in 2020, has been declining ever since, and has been below 16% since 2023.
As competition for grants intensifies, NGOs increasingly incorporate patriotic language into their applications. The data shows a steady rise in applications using patriotic terms25 in the description of their projects. This trend suggests that organizations assume the Presidential Grants Fund, as a state institution, would favor patriotically-framed proposals.
The combination of shrinking real funding and growing demand has created intensifying competition. While the volume of applications continues to grow or at least hold steady year on year, the number of winning applications has declined sharply, from over 4,400 in 2020 to fewer than 3,200 in 2025. To maintain meaningful grant award amounts despite the ruble’s depreciation, the Fund appears to have reduced the number of awards rather than spread the same ruble amount around more thinly. The win rate, which peaked at 23% in 2020, has been declining ever since, and has been below 16% since 2023.
As competition for grants intensifies, NGOs increasingly incorporate patriotic language into their applications. The data shows a steady rise in applications using patriotic terms25 in the description of their projects. This trend suggests that organizations assume the Presidential Grants Fund, as a state institution, would favor patriotically-framed proposals.
Fig. 2 Applications Using Patriotic Terms by Year
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
However, the use of patriotic terminology does not appear to improve success rates. Across most years, successful applications containing patriotic language remain relatively stable, at around 400 to 500 grants annually. The one notable exception occurred in 2020, coinciding with the 75th anniversary of Russia’s victory in World War II, when successful applications using patriotic terms increased significantly, to approximately 700 grants, the highest number observed across the analyzed period. This suggests that while patriotic framing generally provides no competitive advantage in and of itself, success appears to be determined by other factors rather than the use of patriotic language alone.
While applicants are trying to guess the hidden keys to application success, the intensifying competition has particularly disadvantaged newcomers. The share of NGOs submitting applications for the first time dropped during the first few years as the competition gained momentum, then stabilized from 2021 at the same level of around 19% to 21% of all participants. Meanwhile, the share of first-time applicants among winners has been decreasing each year, falling to below 10% in 2024. This suggests that an NGO’s experience and a proven track record play the key roles in its chances of success, forcing newcomers to struggle to break into an increasingly exclusive system.
While applicants are trying to guess the hidden keys to application success, the intensifying competition has particularly disadvantaged newcomers. The share of NGOs submitting applications for the first time dropped during the first few years as the competition gained momentum, then stabilized from 2021 at the same level of around 19% to 21% of all participants. Meanwhile, the share of first-time applicants among winners has been decreasing each year, falling to below 10% in 2024. This suggests that an NGO’s experience and a proven track record play the key roles in its chances of success, forcing newcomers to struggle to break into an increasingly exclusive system.
Fig 4. Share of First-Time Applicants Among Winners Over Time
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
These developments reveal both the achievements and contradictions of the Presidential Grants Fund system. The Presidential Grants Fund has successfully established itself as a stable source of financing for NGOs. Interest in securing funding from it has remained consistently high year after year, making it an important factor in the overall development of the nonprofit sector.
However, underlying tensions have emerged. The reduction in the number of winners has intensified competition among applicants. Notably, the key advantage in this competitive environment appears to be organizational experience and track record, rather than political framing of projects.
Consequently, the evolving dynamics suggest a gradual transformation from an inclusive funding mechanism toward a more concentrated system that primarily benefits established organizations. This raises questions about the Fund’s stated mission of providing equal opportunities and broad coverage across the NGO sector.
Step Two: Consolidation
Regular Contests
According to the expert council evaluation process that is openly published, nearly 40% of the assessment of a grant proposal consists of points related to the NGO’s previous experience, its track record of successful implementation of similar projects, relevant team expertise, and resources that the organization is prepared to invest in the project itself, including both co-financing and existing infrastructure.26 This evaluation framework creates a self-reinforcing cycle whereby experienced NGOs continuously increase their chances of winning grants, while newcomers face barriers to entry.
This consolidation effect is clearly reflected in the funding statistics: more than 43% of total funding is consolidated among remarkably small group of NGOs in the 95th percentile and above of the funding distribution. This group of top 5% NGOs consists of 7,696 organizations that got funding for only 84,696 projects; by contrast, the remaining 57% of are distributed across 28,787 projects among the other 95% of organizations.
However, underlying tensions have emerged. The reduction in the number of winners has intensified competition among applicants. Notably, the key advantage in this competitive environment appears to be organizational experience and track record, rather than political framing of projects.
Consequently, the evolving dynamics suggest a gradual transformation from an inclusive funding mechanism toward a more concentrated system that primarily benefits established organizations. This raises questions about the Fund’s stated mission of providing equal opportunities and broad coverage across the NGO sector.
Step Two: Consolidation
Regular Contests
According to the expert council evaluation process that is openly published, nearly 40% of the assessment of a grant proposal consists of points related to the NGO’s previous experience, its track record of successful implementation of similar projects, relevant team expertise, and resources that the organization is prepared to invest in the project itself, including both co-financing and existing infrastructure.26 This evaluation framework creates a self-reinforcing cycle whereby experienced NGOs continuously increase their chances of winning grants, while newcomers face barriers to entry.
This consolidation effect is clearly reflected in the funding statistics: more than 43% of total funding is consolidated among remarkably small group of NGOs in the 95th percentile and above of the funding distribution. This group of top 5% NGOs consists of 7,696 organizations that got funding for only 84,696 projects; by contrast, the remaining 57% of are distributed across 28,787 projects among the other 95% of organizations.
Fig 5. Extreme Concentration of Grant Funding Lorenz Curve | Gini Index 0.703
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
Fig 6. The Share of Successful Applicants : Top 5% vs Other NGOs
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
Fig 7. Grant Amounts: Top 5% vs Other NGOS
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
The data shows that the top 5% of NGOs in terms of cumulative grant award funding secured have median success rates of approximately 50%–60%, while other NGOs have median success rates around 10%–15%.
In terms of grant amounts, other NGOs receive average grants of approximately 1.5 million rubles ($20,800), while organizations in the top 5% receive significantly larger grants of around 6.5 million rubles ($89,200). The maximum grants reach nearly 118 million rubles (almost $2 million) for top-tier NGOs, compared with approximately 18 million rubles ($270,000) for other organizations.
NGOs in the top 5% by total funding also demonstrate remarkable consistency: on average, they win 16% of all available grants, providing them with nearly continuous funding.
This regular funding stream allows these top 5% NGOs to plan larger projects and develop more stable operations. However, it also creates a dependency on the Presidential Grants Fund, as these organizations increasingly come to rely on this consistent source of support for their activities.
Although the Fund is primarily aimed at supporting NGOs’ special projects rather than their regular operations, top5% organizations that win grants annually begin to rely on Fund grants as a regular part of their budget and implement long-term, expensive projects that would be impossible without these presidential grants. While this stability benefits project planning and implementation, it also means that changes in Fund priorities or policies could significantly impact these organizations’ operations.
Among the Fund’s official funding categories, there are patriotic ones such as “preservation of historical memory,” “development of diplomacy,” and “support for the Russian diaspora.” However, across all participating organizations, grants are primarily concentrated in politically neutral areas focused on supporting socially vulnerable groups, family support, and healthcare. Social services and social support consistently lead with the highest number of applications, followed by support for family, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood. This indicates that the Fund prioritizes projects focused on social assistance, which allows the state to delegate some of its own functions to the third sector.
In contrast, more patriotic categories receive significantly fewer grants overall: preservation of historical memory typically sees moderate activity, while development of diplomacy and support for diaspora remain consistently low. There is one notable exception to this pattern: non-top-tier organizations showed a clear increase in historical memory projects in 2020, during the 75th anniversary of Russia’s victory in World War II.
This general distribution pattern becomes even more pronounced among top-performing organizations. The data shows that top-tier NGOs concentrate their successful applications heavily in politically neutral categories—with social services and social support consistently leading with over 100 winning applications per year, followed by support for family, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood at around 80 to 90 winning applications annually.
In terms of grant amounts, other NGOs receive average grants of approximately 1.5 million rubles ($20,800), while organizations in the top 5% receive significantly larger grants of around 6.5 million rubles ($89,200). The maximum grants reach nearly 118 million rubles (almost $2 million) for top-tier NGOs, compared with approximately 18 million rubles ($270,000) for other organizations.
NGOs in the top 5% by total funding also demonstrate remarkable consistency: on average, they win 16% of all available grants, providing them with nearly continuous funding.
This regular funding stream allows these top 5% NGOs to plan larger projects and develop more stable operations. However, it also creates a dependency on the Presidential Grants Fund, as these organizations increasingly come to rely on this consistent source of support for their activities.
Although the Fund is primarily aimed at supporting NGOs’ special projects rather than their regular operations, top5% organizations that win grants annually begin to rely on Fund grants as a regular part of their budget and implement long-term, expensive projects that would be impossible without these presidential grants. While this stability benefits project planning and implementation, it also means that changes in Fund priorities or policies could significantly impact these organizations’ operations.
Among the Fund’s official funding categories, there are patriotic ones such as “preservation of historical memory,” “development of diplomacy,” and “support for the Russian diaspora.” However, across all participating organizations, grants are primarily concentrated in politically neutral areas focused on supporting socially vulnerable groups, family support, and healthcare. Social services and social support consistently lead with the highest number of applications, followed by support for family, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood. This indicates that the Fund prioritizes projects focused on social assistance, which allows the state to delegate some of its own functions to the third sector.
In contrast, more patriotic categories receive significantly fewer grants overall: preservation of historical memory typically sees moderate activity, while development of diplomacy and support for diaspora remain consistently low. There is one notable exception to this pattern: non-top-tier organizations showed a clear increase in historical memory projects in 2020, during the 75th anniversary of Russia’s victory in World War II.
This general distribution pattern becomes even more pronounced among top-performing organizations. The data shows that top-tier NGOs concentrate their successful applications heavily in politically neutral categories—with social services and social support consistently leading with over 100 winning applications per year, followed by support for family, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood at around 80 to 90 winning applications annually.
Fig 8. Number of Winning Applicants by Direction Over Time (Top 5% NGOs)
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
Among these top performers, patriotically-oriented categories receive even fewer grants: preservation of historical memory fluctuates between 35 and 65 winning applications per year, while development of diplomacy and support for the Russian diaspora remains consistently low at around 10 to 20 winning applications annually. Notably, the 2020 surge in historical memory projects overall is not visible among the top-tier organizations, suggesting that established NGOs stick to their usual focus areas and do not switch to patriotic themes during political events, unlike other NGOs that respond more to such occasions. The beginning of the war with Ukraine did not increase the number of politically- or patriotically-oriented winning applications.
The prioritization of socially-oriented projects aligns with the original rationale for organizing budget financing for the third sector by relying on NGO expertise and delegating social problem-solving to them. However, the state cannot extend this trust to a wide range of organizations. Instead, it identifies a narrow circle that receives heavier support and deeper trust. In this context, maintaining a circle of trusted foundations that can handle substantial government support is more important for the Fund than expanding nonprofit sector coverage.
Organizations directly affiliated with the state (those established by the Russian Federation, federal subjects, municipal entities, or state and local government bodies) are not permitted to participate in contests. However, among the top-tier organizations are NGOs whose trust, and consequently funding, relies not on direct legal connections to the state but on their indirect affiliations.
Many top5% NGOs belong to or are affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church.27 Other organizations are connected through their board members, who either hold positions in the Russian Federation government or are close relatives of officials. For example, the NGO Quarter Louis (Квартал Луи), which also works on social adaptation for people with disabilities, was headed until 2020 by Maria Lvova-Belova, the current Children’s Rights Commissioner, and is now led by her sister Sophia Lvova-Belova. The foundation is under sanctions for its involvement in the fraudulent adoptions of children taken from occupied Ukrainian territories by Russia.28
These foundations operate with inherent political alignment rather than mere dependency-based influence. By providing them with funding through presidential grants, the state on one hand delegates some of its tasks to third-party organizations, while on the other hand it does not need to worry that the funding will be used for purposes contrary to government priorities.
Another significant group of top-performing organizations follows a different pattern. Despite their focus on politically neutral themes, even the most socially-oriented organizations among the top performers show signs of adapting to a broader political context. Organizations like Joy in Old Age (Старость в радость), which supports elderly people; the Center for Therapeutic Pedagogy (Центр лечебной педагогики), which assists children and adults with developmental disorders; and the Perspective Foundation (Перспектива), which helps people with disabilities, have all consistently received annual funding. These foundations serve as examples of organizations that maintain their core social missions and do not shift toward political themes in their grant applications.
Yet it is difficult to find a foundation among them whose activities have not been affected by the war with Ukraine, the most significant political event during the Presidential Grants Fund’s existence. Some have joined efforts to help relocate refugees from the occupied territories, while others have begun traveling to the occupied territories with training seminars for specialists there.
The extent of pressure on socially-oriented foundations is particularly evident in light of their treatment following acts of political dissent. When 136 organizations signed an open letter opposing the military operation in Ukraine and subsequently applied for presidential grants after February 24, 2022, only 30 succeeded in securing funding.29 While the Presidential Grants Fund director explained these results as reflecting heightened competition, foundation representatives interpreted them as direct retaliation for their public stance.
The case of the Vera Foundation (Фонд “Вера,” which means “faith”) illustrates this pattern clearly: despite belonging to the top-performing organizations with a consistent track record of annual grants, the foundation failed to receive funding for the first time in its history following its signing the letter. Although it cannot be definitively established whether signing the letter directly caused these funding rejections, the pattern clearly demonstrates that foundations perceive the need to align with the Kremlin’s political agenda to secure continued state support, with this pressure manifesting itself through various mechanisms ranging from pre-emptive self-censorship to adaptation in response to perceived governmental expectations.
Special Contests
Special contests were initially created as an urgent measure to assist groups affected by extraordinary situations. When the first coronavirus lockdown in Russia began in March 2020, the regular contests for that year had already been announced, and the application period for the second contest was nearing its end. Responding to this crisis, a special contest for 2020 was announced by separate decree in May 2020.
Overall, the special contest follows the same procedure as the regular contest, but it was limited to three funding categories:
The contest aimed to support those directly affected by the disease itself (families with coronavirus infections, people from high-risk groups, medical workers, social workers, and volunteers), those for whom lockdown was particularly difficult (the elderly, people with disabilities or serious illnesses, large or single-parent families, families with disabled children), and those who lacked a stable income (disadvantaged and low-income families, women in difficult life situations, and homeless people).
In a crisis situation when the state’s own resources were insufficient, the special contest became an opportunity to rapidly mobilize NGOs and outsource social services to them. When announcing the special contest, Fund President Ilya Chekalin emphasized that grants would be provided to foundations that already had experience working with the contest’s target groups and the weight of this evaluation criterion was increased. In such an extraordinary situation as the coronavirus pandemic, when some of the problems society faced were completely new and therefore no NGOs could have had experience solving them, the Fund remained conservative in distributing its trust and funding.
Similarly, the second special contest was organized in 2022 to support groups affected by the beginning of the full-scale war, including refugees from areas of active combat, volunteers, and military personnel and their families. The application process for the second regular contest was almost completed when the war started, so it could not include projects designed for helping war victims. The additional special contest was announced in June 2022 when the groups that needed help the most were already clear.
Alexander Tkachenko, head of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation on charity and social work, noted that NGOs already engaged in active social assistance understood better how to provide it and therefore deserved support. The special contest accepted applications in two categories: “development of public diplomacy and support for compatriots,” for initiatives related to humanitarian and charitable activities outside Russia, primarily in Donbas; and “social services, social support, and protection of citizens,” for projects within Russia.30
When announcing the first special contest, Fund representatives explicitly stated that they expected to see experienced NGOs among the winners. The data confirms that this factor proved to be key in selecting winners for both the first special contests in 2020, and the second, in 2022. As seen in figure 4, the Special contests have the lowest share of first-time applicant. The special contest in 2022 saw only 10% of its requests submitted by first-time applicants, whereas the regular contests’ applicant pools before and after it consisted of more than 20% new participants, demonstrating that these special contests are all but inaccessible to new NGOs.
Another key difference of special contests is that, unlike regular contests, which give NGOs several months to prepare their applications, special contests were announced just weeks before the application deadline. It cannot be claimed that this has been done deliberately to give advantage to certain affiliated foundations. The short deadlines may simply be determined by the need to distribute money for social assistance as quickly as possible. However, the result is that NGOs that do not have a track record of working with the Fund simply cannot prepare competitive applications in time.
The data shows that special contests are not only effectively closed to would-be newly participating NGOs, but also favor top 5ier participants to a greater extent than do regular contests, since the latter are the most experienced and the most trusted of Fund applicants.
The prioritization of socially-oriented projects aligns with the original rationale for organizing budget financing for the third sector by relying on NGO expertise and delegating social problem-solving to them. However, the state cannot extend this trust to a wide range of organizations. Instead, it identifies a narrow circle that receives heavier support and deeper trust. In this context, maintaining a circle of trusted foundations that can handle substantial government support is more important for the Fund than expanding nonprofit sector coverage.
Organizations directly affiliated with the state (those established by the Russian Federation, federal subjects, municipal entities, or state and local government bodies) are not permitted to participate in contests. However, among the top-tier organizations are NGOs whose trust, and consequently funding, relies not on direct legal connections to the state but on their indirect affiliations.
Many top5% NGOs belong to or are affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church.27 Other organizations are connected through their board members, who either hold positions in the Russian Federation government or are close relatives of officials. For example, the NGO Quarter Louis (Квартал Луи), which also works on social adaptation for people with disabilities, was headed until 2020 by Maria Lvova-Belova, the current Children’s Rights Commissioner, and is now led by her sister Sophia Lvova-Belova. The foundation is under sanctions for its involvement in the fraudulent adoptions of children taken from occupied Ukrainian territories by Russia.28
These foundations operate with inherent political alignment rather than mere dependency-based influence. By providing them with funding through presidential grants, the state on one hand delegates some of its tasks to third-party organizations, while on the other hand it does not need to worry that the funding will be used for purposes contrary to government priorities.
Another significant group of top-performing organizations follows a different pattern. Despite their focus on politically neutral themes, even the most socially-oriented organizations among the top performers show signs of adapting to a broader political context. Organizations like Joy in Old Age (Старость в радость), which supports elderly people; the Center for Therapeutic Pedagogy (Центр лечебной педагогики), which assists children and adults with developmental disorders; and the Perspective Foundation (Перспектива), which helps people with disabilities, have all consistently received annual funding. These foundations serve as examples of organizations that maintain their core social missions and do not shift toward political themes in their grant applications.
Yet it is difficult to find a foundation among them whose activities have not been affected by the war with Ukraine, the most significant political event during the Presidential Grants Fund’s existence. Some have joined efforts to help relocate refugees from the occupied territories, while others have begun traveling to the occupied territories with training seminars for specialists there.
The extent of pressure on socially-oriented foundations is particularly evident in light of their treatment following acts of political dissent. When 136 organizations signed an open letter opposing the military operation in Ukraine and subsequently applied for presidential grants after February 24, 2022, only 30 succeeded in securing funding.29 While the Presidential Grants Fund director explained these results as reflecting heightened competition, foundation representatives interpreted them as direct retaliation for their public stance.
The case of the Vera Foundation (Фонд “Вера,” which means “faith”) illustrates this pattern clearly: despite belonging to the top-performing organizations with a consistent track record of annual grants, the foundation failed to receive funding for the first time in its history following its signing the letter. Although it cannot be definitively established whether signing the letter directly caused these funding rejections, the pattern clearly demonstrates that foundations perceive the need to align with the Kremlin’s political agenda to secure continued state support, with this pressure manifesting itself through various mechanisms ranging from pre-emptive self-censorship to adaptation in response to perceived governmental expectations.
Special Contests
Special contests were initially created as an urgent measure to assist groups affected by extraordinary situations. When the first coronavirus lockdown in Russia began in March 2020, the regular contests for that year had already been announced, and the application period for the second contest was nearing its end. Responding to this crisis, a special contest for 2020 was announced by separate decree in May 2020.
Overall, the special contest follows the same procedure as the regular contest, but it was limited to three funding categories:
- social services
- healthcare and promotion of healthy lifestyles
- support for families, motherhood, fatherhood, and childhood
The contest aimed to support those directly affected by the disease itself (families with coronavirus infections, people from high-risk groups, medical workers, social workers, and volunteers), those for whom lockdown was particularly difficult (the elderly, people with disabilities or serious illnesses, large or single-parent families, families with disabled children), and those who lacked a stable income (disadvantaged and low-income families, women in difficult life situations, and homeless people).
In a crisis situation when the state’s own resources were insufficient, the special contest became an opportunity to rapidly mobilize NGOs and outsource social services to them. When announcing the special contest, Fund President Ilya Chekalin emphasized that grants would be provided to foundations that already had experience working with the contest’s target groups and the weight of this evaluation criterion was increased. In such an extraordinary situation as the coronavirus pandemic, when some of the problems society faced were completely new and therefore no NGOs could have had experience solving them, the Fund remained conservative in distributing its trust and funding.
Similarly, the second special contest was organized in 2022 to support groups affected by the beginning of the full-scale war, including refugees from areas of active combat, volunteers, and military personnel and their families. The application process for the second regular contest was almost completed when the war started, so it could not include projects designed for helping war victims. The additional special contest was announced in June 2022 when the groups that needed help the most were already clear.
Alexander Tkachenko, head of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation on charity and social work, noted that NGOs already engaged in active social assistance understood better how to provide it and therefore deserved support. The special contest accepted applications in two categories: “development of public diplomacy and support for compatriots,” for initiatives related to humanitarian and charitable activities outside Russia, primarily in Donbas; and “social services, social support, and protection of citizens,” for projects within Russia.30
When announcing the first special contest, Fund representatives explicitly stated that they expected to see experienced NGOs among the winners. The data confirms that this factor proved to be key in selecting winners for both the first special contests in 2020, and the second, in 2022. As seen in figure 4, the Special contests have the lowest share of first-time applicant. The special contest in 2022 saw only 10% of its requests submitted by first-time applicants, whereas the regular contests’ applicant pools before and after it consisted of more than 20% new participants, demonstrating that these special contests are all but inaccessible to new NGOs.
Another key difference of special contests is that, unlike regular contests, which give NGOs several months to prepare their applications, special contests were announced just weeks before the application deadline. It cannot be claimed that this has been done deliberately to give advantage to certain affiliated foundations. The short deadlines may simply be determined by the need to distribute money for social assistance as quickly as possible. However, the result is that NGOs that do not have a track record of working with the Fund simply cannot prepare competitive applications in time.
The data shows that special contests are not only effectively closed to would-be newly participating NGOs, but also favor top 5ier participants to a greater extent than do regular contests, since the latter are the most experienced and the most trusted of Fund applicants.
Fig 9. Share of Top-Tier NGOs Among Winners By Contest
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
The special contests of 2020 and 2022 represent an extreme expression of general trends in the Fund’s disbursements. In crisis situations, the Fund becomes even less willing to entrust the resolution of social issues to newcomer NGOs, and relies even more heavily on organizations with which it already has long experience of cooperation. In such situations, the tasks of developing civil society and its relevant infrastructure, which the Fund has set for itself, cease to be addressed entirely. The only remaining priority is the state’s need to delegate addressing acute social problems to someone else, while simultaneously showing society that the state is not standing aside and is in fact putting its resources to good use.
Notably, two special contests have also been announced in 2025.The first special contest targeted projects in Abkhazia and the second focused on projects in South. Since both contests support projects outside Russian territory, they accepted applications only under the category “development of public diplomacy and support for the Russian diaspora,” specifically for social projects in education and healthcare, as well as the commemoration of Great Patriotic War (that is, World War II) veterans. On the other hand, the contests followed the general procedure of the regular contests and thus were open only to Russian organizations. Local NGOs could not participate.
These two contests most clearly exemplify the trends observed in earlier competitions: they were announced just days before the applications opened, no first-time participants applied for grants, and only highly-experienced foundations managed to win. But unlike previous special contests, these were not launched in response to any urgent or extraordinary situation. While the Abkhazia contest followed a political crisis and early elections, this situation cannot be compared in severity to coronavirus or the Ukraine War’s onset. In those earlier crisis cases, society expected the state to provide extraordinary support for those affected. In contrast, the special contests in Abkhazia and South Ossetia clearly do not respond to societal expectations. Presidential Fund representatives have offered no explanation for why these contests are necessary.
The special contest in Abkhazia was followed by a separate contest organized by one of the winners, the Garant Center for Social Technologies (Центр социальных технологий “Гарант”), jointly with the Presidential Grants Fund.31 This allowed for organizing a contest among Abkhazian NGOs and initiative groups and allocating grants to them from the Presidential Grants Fund—not directly, but through the winning foundation. The contest followed the standard procedures of Presidential Grants Fund competitions and funded projects aimed at improving quality of life, addressing pressing social issues, and developing local territories.
Meanwhile, in September 2025, it was announced that South Ossetia would join the Russian Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives grant program starting in 2026, and training seminars began to be conducted in Tskhinvali to prepare applications for contest participation.32
This evolution reveals a significant trend: special contests have become normalized rather than remaining tied to extraordinary circumstances, and now they could also serve as tools for achieving the state’s political objectives, such as maintaining memory of the Great Patriotic War and extending cultural influence in regions that are not even part of Russia.
Step Three: Decentralization
Subsidiary Funds
Despite the fact that the Presidential Grants Fund was created as a single central operator to replace several foundations distributing presidential grants, starting in 2021 the Fund began to diversify, with new subsidiary funds emerging where the Presidential Grants Fund serves as founder or participates in funding distribution decisions.
Since 2021, it has become the founder of two subsidiary funds: the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, in 2021, and the Presidential Fund for Environmental and Conservation Projects, in 2025. Furthermore, since 2021, it has begun distributing additional financing to regional funds to support NGOs that are located outside of Moscow.
The competitive procedures in these new funds generally share the same structure as the Presidential Grants Fund’s competitive procedures, with identical criteria and evaluation processes. Applications and results are also published openly. However, the rules and thematic focus differ from those of the central fund, thereby expanding the pool of potential participants.
The data shows that this expansion has increased total state funding. Although the Presidential Fund has decreased, the combined value of the three funds now is even greater.
Starting in 2022, when the Cultural Initiatives Fund first conducted two full annual competitions, the combined funding distributed through the Presidential Grants Fund and its subsidiary funds reached approximately 20 billion rubles annually. The Presidential Fund itself maintains its baseline of around 7 to 8 billion rubles ($90–$110 million), while the Cultural Initiatives Fund distributes another 9 to 10 billion rubles ($115–$130 million), and regional co-funding distributed among local grant operators contributes an additional 2 billion rubles ($25–$30 million).
Notably, two special contests have also been announced in 2025.The first special contest targeted projects in Abkhazia and the second focused on projects in South. Since both contests support projects outside Russian territory, they accepted applications only under the category “development of public diplomacy and support for the Russian diaspora,” specifically for social projects in education and healthcare, as well as the commemoration of Great Patriotic War (that is, World War II) veterans. On the other hand, the contests followed the general procedure of the regular contests and thus were open only to Russian organizations. Local NGOs could not participate.
These two contests most clearly exemplify the trends observed in earlier competitions: they were announced just days before the applications opened, no first-time participants applied for grants, and only highly-experienced foundations managed to win. But unlike previous special contests, these were not launched in response to any urgent or extraordinary situation. While the Abkhazia contest followed a political crisis and early elections, this situation cannot be compared in severity to coronavirus or the Ukraine War’s onset. In those earlier crisis cases, society expected the state to provide extraordinary support for those affected. In contrast, the special contests in Abkhazia and South Ossetia clearly do not respond to societal expectations. Presidential Fund representatives have offered no explanation for why these contests are necessary.
The special contest in Abkhazia was followed by a separate contest organized by one of the winners, the Garant Center for Social Technologies (Центр социальных технологий “Гарант”), jointly with the Presidential Grants Fund.31 This allowed for organizing a contest among Abkhazian NGOs and initiative groups and allocating grants to them from the Presidential Grants Fund—not directly, but through the winning foundation. The contest followed the standard procedures of Presidential Grants Fund competitions and funded projects aimed at improving quality of life, addressing pressing social issues, and developing local territories.
Meanwhile, in September 2025, it was announced that South Ossetia would join the Russian Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives grant program starting in 2026, and training seminars began to be conducted in Tskhinvali to prepare applications for contest participation.32
This evolution reveals a significant trend: special contests have become normalized rather than remaining tied to extraordinary circumstances, and now they could also serve as tools for achieving the state’s political objectives, such as maintaining memory of the Great Patriotic War and extending cultural influence in regions that are not even part of Russia.
Step Three: Decentralization
Subsidiary Funds
Despite the fact that the Presidential Grants Fund was created as a single central operator to replace several foundations distributing presidential grants, starting in 2021 the Fund began to diversify, with new subsidiary funds emerging where the Presidential Grants Fund serves as founder or participates in funding distribution decisions.
Since 2021, it has become the founder of two subsidiary funds: the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives, in 2021, and the Presidential Fund for Environmental and Conservation Projects, in 2025. Furthermore, since 2021, it has begun distributing additional financing to regional funds to support NGOs that are located outside of Moscow.
The competitive procedures in these new funds generally share the same structure as the Presidential Grants Fund’s competitive procedures, with identical criteria and evaluation processes. Applications and results are also published openly. However, the rules and thematic focus differ from those of the central fund, thereby expanding the pool of potential participants.
The data shows that this expansion has increased total state funding. Although the Presidential Fund has decreased, the combined value of the three funds now is even greater.
Starting in 2022, when the Cultural Initiatives Fund first conducted two full annual competitions, the combined funding distributed through the Presidential Grants Fund and its subsidiary funds reached approximately 20 billion rubles annually. The Presidential Fund itself maintains its baseline of around 7 to 8 billion rubles ($90–$110 million), while the Cultural Initiatives Fund distributes another 9 to 10 billion rubles ($115–$130 million), and regional co-funding distributed among local grant operators contributes an additional 2 billion rubles ($25–$30 million).
Fig 10. Total Funding by Year and Fund (in millions USD)
1. Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition since 2017
Presidential Grants Fund; Prepared by To be Precise
2. Regional co-funding by Presidential Grants Fund since 2021
3. Projects of the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives since 2021
Notably, the Cultural Initiatives Fund’s funding has already exceeded that of the Presidential Grants Fund itself, making the Presidential Grants Fund no longer the largest distributor of budget grants. This shift means that separate cultural projects now receive significantly more funding than they received when they were part of the Presidential Grants system. The dramatic increase in cultural funding suggests a potential reordering of state priorities, where ideologically-aligned cultural production may have become as important as direct social assistance in the government’s grant allocation strategy.
The Fund for Environmental and Conservation Projects is not shown on the chart, since it is currently still taking applications for its first competition.
Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives
Since the first regular contest of 2022, the Presidential Grants Fund has stopped supporting arts and culture projects, including those for talented youth. To support projects in this area, a separate Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives was established, with the Presidential Grants Fund serving as its founder.33
In many ways, the Cultural Initiatives Fund replicates the structure of the Presidential Grants Fund. It held its first contest in 2021 and has since held two regular contests annually, adding special contests starting in 2022. Data on participants and contest results is also publicly available, and the fund employs a similar application evaluation system where applicants’ existing infrastructure, experience, and co-financing capabilities are important factors. Unlike the Presidential Grants contests, this fund accepts applications not only from nonprofit organizations, but also from commercial organizations and individual entrepreneurs. This grant contest does not aim to develop civil society, but rather to establish new cultural initiatives. The restriction limiting participation only to nonprofit organizations becomes irrelevant, as creative groups may be a part of the commercial or even state sectors of economy.34
The Fund for Environmental and Conservation Projects is not shown on the chart, since it is currently still taking applications for its first competition.
Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives
Since the first regular contest of 2022, the Presidential Grants Fund has stopped supporting arts and culture projects, including those for talented youth. To support projects in this area, a separate Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives was established, with the Presidential Grants Fund serving as its founder.33
In many ways, the Cultural Initiatives Fund replicates the structure of the Presidential Grants Fund. It held its first contest in 2021 and has since held two regular contests annually, adding special contests starting in 2022. Data on participants and contest results is also publicly available, and the fund employs a similar application evaluation system where applicants’ existing infrastructure, experience, and co-financing capabilities are important factors. Unlike the Presidential Grants contests, this fund accepts applications not only from nonprofit organizations, but also from commercial organizations and individual entrepreneurs. This grant contest does not aim to develop civil society, but rather to establish new cultural initiatives. The restriction limiting participation only to nonprofit organizations becomes irrelevant, as creative groups may be a part of the commercial or even state sectors of economy.34
Fig 11. Total Funding by Year and Fund (in millions USD)
Projects of the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives Contests since 2021
Each year since 2022, when the Cultural Initiatives Fund started conducting two contests per year, it has allocated between 8.5 and 9.5 billion rubles ($100–$130 million), with the actual value of the allocated grants decreasing due to inflation. As with the Presidential Grants Fund, the competition has grown more intense over time, with the number of winners declining from 2,602 in 2022 to 1,826 in 2025.
In the Presidential Grants Fund, the categories devoted to supporting arts and culture were general and did not set specific frameworks for what kind of projects should be supported. Special contests of the Cultural Initiatives Fund are not funded through an additional mechanism, but share the total sum of grants allocated per year, unlike in the Presidential Grants Fund.
In the Cultural Initiatives Fund, each category from the first contest of 2021 has not only a general short title, but also a detailed description indicating how cultural priorities should be determined and what general message the future cultural project should carry. For example, the category “I Am Proud” specified that projects should promote “cultural and creative achievements of the country, highlighting bright and glorious pages of domestic culture, history, and modernity,” and emphasize pride not only in “ancestors’ exploits,” but also in contemporary heroes such as “doctors, social workers, [and] volunteers,” showing "selflessness, courage, [and] self-sacrifice in their service to society.”
However, these categories are no longer neutral but heavily patriotically oriented, falling into categories of glorifying Russian culture, Russian history, the memory of the Great Patriotic War, and promoting traditional values or the culture and traditions of Russian regions (see Appendix).35
This focus became even more pronounced in the special contests conducted in 2022 and 2023 after the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. The contest regulations state that they aim not simply to support arts and culture projects, but to “promote and preserve Russia’s unified cultural identity, counter ‘cancel culture,’ strengthen traditional Russian spiritual and moral values under sanctions pressure, and support cultural groups and artists who have faced sanctions due to their patriotism and loyalty to the country.”36
The impact of the onset of the war has been reflected not only in special contest themes but also in regular contests, wherein new categories emerged emphasizing unity with new territories and glorifying combat participants.37 The direction “We Are Together,” introduced in the first contest of 2023, focused on “integration of Donbass and liberated territories into a unified cultural-educational space” and promoted “projects about heroism and courage, self-sacrifice and bravery.” By 2025, the category “Guarding the Fatherland” explicitly called for projects “telling about the heroism of special military operation participants” and “emphasizing key character of unity between front lines and rear for victory.”
The Cultural Initiatives Fund has proven to be much less neutral and far more flexible and responsive than the Presidential Grants Fund, rapidly adapting to changing political agendas and incorporating new ideological priorities—from territorial integration themes following the war between Russia and Ukraine since 2022, to explicit support for military operations by 2025. This arrangement allows the state to delegate the tasks and framing of patriotic cultural projects to a subsidiary fund while enabling the main Presidential Grants Fund to continue focusing its primary efforts on social projects.
Regional Funds
The unequal distribution of grants provided directly by the Presidential Fund is evident not only in the preference for large, experienced organizations, but also in the pattern of distribution across regions. Among both participants and winners, the overwhelming majority consists of organizations from Moscow.
When examining Presidential Grants Fund data across the entire contest period from 2017 to 2025, Moscow dominates with over 24 billion rubles ($336 million) in total funding across all years, followed by Saint Petersburg with approximately 5 billion rubles ($69 million). The distribution drops sharply after these two major cities, with most other regions receiving less than 2 billion rubles ($27 million) in total funding over the entire period. The funding concentration is extremely pronounced, with Moscow receiving roughly five times as much funding as Saint Petersburg, and eight times more than all other regions combined.
In the Presidential Grants Fund, the categories devoted to supporting arts and culture were general and did not set specific frameworks for what kind of projects should be supported. Special contests of the Cultural Initiatives Fund are not funded through an additional mechanism, but share the total sum of grants allocated per year, unlike in the Presidential Grants Fund.
In the Cultural Initiatives Fund, each category from the first contest of 2021 has not only a general short title, but also a detailed description indicating how cultural priorities should be determined and what general message the future cultural project should carry. For example, the category “I Am Proud” specified that projects should promote “cultural and creative achievements of the country, highlighting bright and glorious pages of domestic culture, history, and modernity,” and emphasize pride not only in “ancestors’ exploits,” but also in contemporary heroes such as “doctors, social workers, [and] volunteers,” showing "selflessness, courage, [and] self-sacrifice in their service to society.”
However, these categories are no longer neutral but heavily patriotically oriented, falling into categories of glorifying Russian culture, Russian history, the memory of the Great Patriotic War, and promoting traditional values or the culture and traditions of Russian regions (see Appendix).35
This focus became even more pronounced in the special contests conducted in 2022 and 2023 after the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine. The contest regulations state that they aim not simply to support arts and culture projects, but to “promote and preserve Russia’s unified cultural identity, counter ‘cancel culture,’ strengthen traditional Russian spiritual and moral values under sanctions pressure, and support cultural groups and artists who have faced sanctions due to their patriotism and loyalty to the country.”36
The impact of the onset of the war has been reflected not only in special contest themes but also in regular contests, wherein new categories emerged emphasizing unity with new territories and glorifying combat participants.37 The direction “We Are Together,” introduced in the first contest of 2023, focused on “integration of Donbass and liberated territories into a unified cultural-educational space” and promoted “projects about heroism and courage, self-sacrifice and bravery.” By 2025, the category “Guarding the Fatherland” explicitly called for projects “telling about the heroism of special military operation participants” and “emphasizing key character of unity between front lines and rear for victory.”
The Cultural Initiatives Fund has proven to be much less neutral and far more flexible and responsive than the Presidential Grants Fund, rapidly adapting to changing political agendas and incorporating new ideological priorities—from territorial integration themes following the war between Russia and Ukraine since 2022, to explicit support for military operations by 2025. This arrangement allows the state to delegate the tasks and framing of patriotic cultural projects to a subsidiary fund while enabling the main Presidential Grants Fund to continue focusing its primary efforts on social projects.
Regional Funds
The unequal distribution of grants provided directly by the Presidential Fund is evident not only in the preference for large, experienced organizations, but also in the pattern of distribution across regions. Among both participants and winners, the overwhelming majority consists of organizations from Moscow.
When examining Presidential Grants Fund data across the entire contest period from 2017 to 2025, Moscow dominates with over 24 billion rubles ($336 million) in total funding across all years, followed by Saint Petersburg with approximately 5 billion rubles ($69 million). The distribution drops sharply after these two major cities, with most other regions receiving less than 2 billion rubles ($27 million) in total funding over the entire period. The funding concentration is extremely pronounced, with Moscow receiving roughly five times as much funding as Saint Petersburg, and eight times more than all other regions combined.
Fig 12. Total Funding by Region since 2017 – Top 20 (in millions USD)
Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition Since 2017
Presidential Grants fund; Prepared by To be Precise
When adjusted for population over the entire period, Moscow residents have received an average of 207 rubles ($2.76) per person, compared with 45 rubles ($0.60) per person in other regions—over 4.6 times more funding per capita. Moscow-based organizations also have a higher application success rate, with 0.36 winning applications per 1,000 residents compared with 0.26 winning applications per 1,000 people elsewhere.
To counterbalance the inequality between Moscow and the rest of Russia, in 2021 the Presidential Grants Fund started to distribute grants to co-finance applications from regional grant operators annually. Since then, each year the Fund transfers 2 billion rubles ($24 million) to be distributed among winning grant applications from local NGOs outside the capital region. These grants are distributed across 84 regions excluding Moscow.
To counterbalance the inequality between Moscow and the rest of Russia, in 2021 the Presidential Grants Fund started to distribute grants to co-finance applications from regional grant operators annually. Since then, each year the Fund transfers 2 billion rubles ($24 million) to be distributed among winning grant applications from local NGOs outside the capital region. These grants are distributed across 84 regions excluding Moscow.
Fig 13. Total Funding by Year (excluding Moscow)
1. Projects of the Presidential Grants Fund Competition since 2017
Presidential Grants Fund; prepared by To be Precise
2. Regional co-funding provided Presidential Grants Fund since 2021
Regional co-financing for the occupied Ukrainian territories of the LPR (Luhansk People’s Republic), DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic), Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and Kherson Oblast began only in 2025, despite Russia’s declaration of these territories as part of the Russian Federation in September 2022, and ongoing funding of projects there through the Presidential Grants Fund and Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives.
Regional co-financing requires that funding come from the regional government through a local grant operator, necessitating both a unified operator and sufficient officially registered foundations within the region. Financing cannot be made available until this infrastructure is established. By 2025, this infrastructure had apparently been developed.
The grants do not go directly to nonprofit organizations but are channeled through regional operators: either regional government ministries or NGOs established by them. Each operator solicits applications, selects winners, determines project requirements, and defines the categories for which NGOs can apply.
This is still notably less than the funding provided directly from the Presidential Fund’s contests, but it does provide a stable and reliable source of funding that does not come directly from the Presidential Fund, and this gives the regional operators freedom to decide which categories are more relevant for their region.
Beyond Presidential Funding
Number of Registered Organizations
The Presidential Grants Fund shows clear signs of consolidation: funding is increasingly concentrated among a small group of trusted, experienced NGOs, while newcomers face growing barriers to participation. However, this pattern does not indicate that similar consolidation is occurring across the entire third sector. Rather than showing sector-wide stagnation, the broader nonprofit landscape continues to demonstrate growth and diversification beyond the Presidential Grants Fund’s increasingly concentrated distribution model.
The primary source of information about the quantitative composition of nonprofit organizations is the NGO registry maintained by the Ministry of Justice, where all NGOs are required to register. The Ministry of Justice Registry encompasses all organizations that qualify as NGOs under federal law: organizations that do not distribute profits among participants.38 This registry covers a broad spectrum of entities, ranging from charitable foundations to ethnic communities, Cossack societies, political parties, and religious organizations. As a result, this source is unreliable and should not be used as a reference, as it defines NGOs too broadly, including those that cannot apply for funding.
The number of organizations registered in the registry has continued to grow steadily over time, rising from around 9,000 new registrations in 2017–2018 to over 12,000 in 2023–2024.
Regional co-financing requires that funding come from the regional government through a local grant operator, necessitating both a unified operator and sufficient officially registered foundations within the region. Financing cannot be made available until this infrastructure is established. By 2025, this infrastructure had apparently been developed.
The grants do not go directly to nonprofit organizations but are channeled through regional operators: either regional government ministries or NGOs established by them. Each operator solicits applications, selects winners, determines project requirements, and defines the categories for which NGOs can apply.
This is still notably less than the funding provided directly from the Presidential Fund’s contests, but it does provide a stable and reliable source of funding that does not come directly from the Presidential Fund, and this gives the regional operators freedom to decide which categories are more relevant for their region.
Beyond Presidential Funding
Number of Registered Organizations
The Presidential Grants Fund shows clear signs of consolidation: funding is increasingly concentrated among a small group of trusted, experienced NGOs, while newcomers face growing barriers to participation. However, this pattern does not indicate that similar consolidation is occurring across the entire third sector. Rather than showing sector-wide stagnation, the broader nonprofit landscape continues to demonstrate growth and diversification beyond the Presidential Grants Fund’s increasingly concentrated distribution model.
The primary source of information about the quantitative composition of nonprofit organizations is the NGO registry maintained by the Ministry of Justice, where all NGOs are required to register. The Ministry of Justice Registry encompasses all organizations that qualify as NGOs under federal law: organizations that do not distribute profits among participants.38 This registry covers a broad spectrum of entities, ranging from charitable foundations to ethnic communities, Cossack societies, political parties, and religious organizations. As a result, this source is unreliable and should not be used as a reference, as it defines NGOs too broadly, including those that cannot apply for funding.
The number of organizations registered in the registry has continued to grow steadily over time, rising from around 9,000 new registrations in 2017–2018 to over 12,000 in 2023–2024.
Fig. 14 Number of Non-Profit Organization Registered by the Ministry of Justice by Year
(after 2006)
Registry of non-profit of organizations;
Ministry of Justice
A considerable share of them have at some point participated in presidential grant competitions, with the highest percentage among foundations registered between 2017 and 2020. To participate in presidential grant contests, a foundation must have been registered for at least one year, which shows that new NGOs view the Presidential Grants Fund as a reliable source of funding: this availability of accessible state funding provides confidence to newly established organizations, encouraging NGO formation and contributing to the continued growth of the third sector.
Another way to assess the Presidential Grants Fund’s reach within the eligible segment of the nonprofit sector is through consulting the Registry of Socially-Oriented Nonprofit Organizations. This registry consolidated two previously separate registries that were created in 2020 to identify organizations affected by the coronavirus pandemic.39 Socially-oriented nonprofits included in the consolidated registry are defined as nonprofit organizations engaged in activities aimed at solving social problems and developing civil society in the Russian Federation, and which engage in other activities that are nearly identical to the official categories funded by the Presidential Grants Fund. The registry includes organizations that have either received state support in some form since 2017 or have submitted the required reports to the Ministry of Justice within the past two years. All Presidential Grants contest winners are automatically included in this registry.
All organizations included in the registry are eligible for tax benefits, preferential incentives, subsidies, and other forms of state support, making registry inclusion highly valuable for NGO operations. Once included, organizations find it much easier to obtain ongoing state support and provide tax incentives to their donors.
21.6% of all registered socially-oriented nonprofits are winners of Presidential Fund grants at least once, 22.4% have competed but lost, and 56% have not even entered the contests. The vast majority of nonprofits were included in the registry because they have received grants, subsidies, or benefits from local authorities, or have provided proper reporting on their activities to the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation for 2 years.
Another way to assess the Presidential Grants Fund’s reach within the eligible segment of the nonprofit sector is through consulting the Registry of Socially-Oriented Nonprofit Organizations. This registry consolidated two previously separate registries that were created in 2020 to identify organizations affected by the coronavirus pandemic.39 Socially-oriented nonprofits included in the consolidated registry are defined as nonprofit organizations engaged in activities aimed at solving social problems and developing civil society in the Russian Federation, and which engage in other activities that are nearly identical to the official categories funded by the Presidential Grants Fund. The registry includes organizations that have either received state support in some form since 2017 or have submitted the required reports to the Ministry of Justice within the past two years. All Presidential Grants contest winners are automatically included in this registry.
All organizations included in the registry are eligible for tax benefits, preferential incentives, subsidies, and other forms of state support, making registry inclusion highly valuable for NGO operations. Once included, organizations find it much easier to obtain ongoing state support and provide tax incentives to their donors.
21.6% of all registered socially-oriented nonprofits are winners of Presidential Fund grants at least once, 22.4% have competed but lost, and 56% have not even entered the contests. The vast majority of nonprofits were included in the registry because they have received grants, subsidies, or benefits from local authorities, or have provided proper reporting on their activities to the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation for 2 years.
Fig. 15 Number of New Registered Non-Profit Organizations
By year
Registry of Socially oriented NPOs 2017 – first half of 2025
Ministry of Economic Development
Winning a Presidential Grants contest secures a straightforward pathway into the registry, after which an organization may choose not to participate in future Presidential Fund competitions while still accessing registry benefits. While Presidential Fund grants are large in amount, the Fund’s competitions are also becoming much more competitive with passing each passing year, and thus harder to rely on.
Following the impetus provided by the coronavirus pandemic, the number of organizations engaged in charitable work continues to grow, and the number of new organizations added to the Registry of Socially-Oriented Nonprofit Organizations in the first half of 2025 has been nearly as many as there were in all of 2024.
This indicates that consolidation within the Presidential Grants Fund has not led to a halt in third sector development. Both the total number of nonprofit organizations and the number of specifically of Socially-Oriented Nonprofit Organizations continue to grow. Presidential Grants Fund competitions stimulate organizations to formally register as NGOs, and winning grants provides entry into the Registry of Socially Oriented Nonprofit Organizations, meaning the competitions encourage the development of third sector infrastructure. However, organizations do not become dependent on the highly competitive Presidential Grants Fund; instead, they rely on other forms of state financing and nongovernmental funding sources.
Nongovernmental Support
Even among NGOs that do participate in Presidential Grants contests, co-financing serves as an important criterion determining the likelihood of winning. Organizations cannot rely solely on grants and are compelled to seek additional funding sources beyond state channels.
According to a 2023 study on professional philanthropy in Russia conducted by SberPrivate Banking and a consulting company, FrankRG, government support constitutes only a small portion of total charitable funding. Based on data from the charitable foundation Help Needed (Нужна помощь), some 129–160 billion rubles (approximately $1.9–2.3 billion) were allocated for charitable purposes in 2022.40
Private individuals donating to NGOs provided the largest share, at 68 billion rubles ($756 million), followed by 29 billion rubles in donations from legal entities ($322 million), while government grants and subsidies contributed only 12 billion rubles ($133 million). Additionally, direct person-to-person donations—difficult to track precisely—ranged from 21 to 52 billion rubles ($233–$578 million).
Despite the war with Ukraine and subsequent sanctions, including the departure of international payment systems, all these funding sources grew from 2020 to 2021 and maintained their levels in 2022. However, experts from the Help Needed studying private donations in 2022 and 2023 describe the situation as stagnation rather than growth, since increases did not keep pace with inflation.41 They do note a rise in recurring payments to 18% since May 2023 compared to the same months of the previous year, a form of private donation crucial for foundations’ ability to plan future expenditures.
Overall, the data indicates that NGOs currently do not rely only on Presidential Grants funding or state funding, but also on other sources.
Conclusion
The Presidential Grants Fund distributes substantial funding that represents a significant resource for Russia’s nonprofit sector. However, the distribution patterns reveal growing inequalities and consolidation among recipients.
A small group of experienced NGOs consistently receives the majority of funding, while newcomers and smaller organizations face increasing difficulty in accessing grants. This trend has intensified over time, creating higher barriers to entry for new participants.
Special contests reveal the extent of consolidation within the Fund’s operations. First introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic as emergency response mechanisms, these contests have since become normalized features of the federal grantmaking system that no longer require extraordinary circumstances. With extremely short application periods and high barriers to entry, they function as exclusive funding channels that show even greater consolidation than do the regular competitions, effectively serving the Fund’s most experienced and trusted partners.
This concentration creates dependency risks. Organizations receiving large portions of Presidential Grants funding may become overly reliant on this source, potentially affecting their independence. However, despite the Fund’s state-backed nature, patriotically-themed projects do not dominate among winners.
Importantly, consolidation within Presidential Grants distribution patterns does not reflect the entire third sector. NGO registrations have continued growing from around 9,000 annually in 2017–2018 to over 12,000 in 2023–2024. Additionally, the Fund has established subsidiary organizations and supports regional competitions where it facilitates rather than directly funds projects.
This suggests that while the Presidential Fund has created an elite tier of grant-dependent organizations, a broader ecosystem of diverse, independently-funded NGOs continues to operate and grow outside this system.
Following the impetus provided by the coronavirus pandemic, the number of organizations engaged in charitable work continues to grow, and the number of new organizations added to the Registry of Socially-Oriented Nonprofit Organizations in the first half of 2025 has been nearly as many as there were in all of 2024.
This indicates that consolidation within the Presidential Grants Fund has not led to a halt in third sector development. Both the total number of nonprofit organizations and the number of specifically of Socially-Oriented Nonprofit Organizations continue to grow. Presidential Grants Fund competitions stimulate organizations to formally register as NGOs, and winning grants provides entry into the Registry of Socially Oriented Nonprofit Organizations, meaning the competitions encourage the development of third sector infrastructure. However, organizations do not become dependent on the highly competitive Presidential Grants Fund; instead, they rely on other forms of state financing and nongovernmental funding sources.
Nongovernmental Support
Even among NGOs that do participate in Presidential Grants contests, co-financing serves as an important criterion determining the likelihood of winning. Organizations cannot rely solely on grants and are compelled to seek additional funding sources beyond state channels.
According to a 2023 study on professional philanthropy in Russia conducted by SberPrivate Banking and a consulting company, FrankRG, government support constitutes only a small portion of total charitable funding. Based on data from the charitable foundation Help Needed (Нужна помощь), some 129–160 billion rubles (approximately $1.9–2.3 billion) were allocated for charitable purposes in 2022.40
Private individuals donating to NGOs provided the largest share, at 68 billion rubles ($756 million), followed by 29 billion rubles in donations from legal entities ($322 million), while government grants and subsidies contributed only 12 billion rubles ($133 million). Additionally, direct person-to-person donations—difficult to track precisely—ranged from 21 to 52 billion rubles ($233–$578 million).
Despite the war with Ukraine and subsequent sanctions, including the departure of international payment systems, all these funding sources grew from 2020 to 2021 and maintained their levels in 2022. However, experts from the Help Needed studying private donations in 2022 and 2023 describe the situation as stagnation rather than growth, since increases did not keep pace with inflation.41 They do note a rise in recurring payments to 18% since May 2023 compared to the same months of the previous year, a form of private donation crucial for foundations’ ability to plan future expenditures.
Overall, the data indicates that NGOs currently do not rely only on Presidential Grants funding or state funding, but also on other sources.
Conclusion
The Presidential Grants Fund distributes substantial funding that represents a significant resource for Russia’s nonprofit sector. However, the distribution patterns reveal growing inequalities and consolidation among recipients.
A small group of experienced NGOs consistently receives the majority of funding, while newcomers and smaller organizations face increasing difficulty in accessing grants. This trend has intensified over time, creating higher barriers to entry for new participants.
Special contests reveal the extent of consolidation within the Fund’s operations. First introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic as emergency response mechanisms, these contests have since become normalized features of the federal grantmaking system that no longer require extraordinary circumstances. With extremely short application periods and high barriers to entry, they function as exclusive funding channels that show even greater consolidation than do the regular competitions, effectively serving the Fund’s most experienced and trusted partners.
This concentration creates dependency risks. Organizations receiving large portions of Presidential Grants funding may become overly reliant on this source, potentially affecting their independence. However, despite the Fund’s state-backed nature, patriotically-themed projects do not dominate among winners.
Importantly, consolidation within Presidential Grants distribution patterns does not reflect the entire third sector. NGO registrations have continued growing from around 9,000 annually in 2017–2018 to over 12,000 in 2023–2024. Additionally, the Fund has established subsidiary organizations and supports regional competitions where it facilitates rather than directly funds projects.
This suggests that while the Presidential Fund has created an elite tier of grant-dependent organizations, a broader ecosystem of diverse, independently-funded NGOs continues to operate and grow outside this system.
Appendix
A. Presidential Grants Fund Contest Dates
A. Presidential Grants Fund Contest Dates
B. Cultural Initiatives Fund Regular Contests Categories
Cit. in Alexander Bick, ‘Assad the Spoiler: Russia's Challenge in Syria’, Wilson Center, April 30, 2020; Jennifer Cafarella with Jason Zhou, ‘Russia’s dead-end diplomacy in Syria’, Institute for the Study of War, 2019, 14; Charles Lister, ‘Russia signals growing dissatisfaction with Syria’s Assad regime’, MEI, May 7, 2020; Mark N. Katz, ‘Has Moscow really turned against Assad?’, AtlanticCouncil.org, 12 May 2020.
Karim Sadjadpour, ‘Iran’s Unwavering Support to Assad’s Syria’, CTC Sentinel 6 :8, August 27, 2013; Annalisa Perteghella, ‘The Importance of Iran-Syria Axis in Fragile Regional Balances’, Milan : ISPI, 15 March 2021
See Antonio Giustozzi, ‘Russia and the Collapse of the Assad Regime’, Russia Program, Washington : George Washington University, Academic Policy Paper Series, no. 8, February 2025.
Daniel L. Byman, ‘Friends Like These’, International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2006), 79–115, 82, 88-9.
Walter C. Ladwig III, The Forgotten Front. Patron-Client Relationships in Counterinsurgency, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2017. See also on Pakistan Aly Zaman, Compliance and defiance in patron-client state relationships: a case study of Pakistan‘s relationship with the United States, 1947-2013, PhD Thesis, Australian National University, August 2015, 250-1 and, for South Korea: In Soo Hwang, The United States - Republic of Korea Security Relationship, Great Power and Small State 1953-1960, PhD Thesis, London : University College London, 1999.
Antonio Giustozzi, The art of coercion, London : Hurst, 2011.
Giustozzi, ‘Russia and the Collapse of the Assad Regime’.
Barbara Elias, Why Allies Rebel: Defiant Local Partners in Counterinsurgency Wars, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, July 2020.
R. W. Komer, ‘Bureaucracy does its thing’, Santa Monica : Rand, 1982, vi.
Interview with officer M*, Syrian Arab Army, Aleppo, September 2018.
Vladimir Sazhin, ‘Russia and Iran in Syria’, Modern Diplomacy, 9 November 2020.
Ammar Hamou, ‘Five years after the Russian military intervention, Iran’s influence in Syria is growing’, Syria Direct, October 5, 2020.
Jennifer Cafarella with Jason Zhou, cit.
Ellie Geranmayeh & Kadri Liik, ‘The new power couple: Russia and Iran in the Middle East, Berlin : European Council On Foreign Relations, 2016.
Jennifer Cafarella with Jason Zhou, cit.
Interview with Colonel A*, IRGC adviser in Syria, February 2016.
Jennifer Cafarella with Jason Zhou, cit., 12-13.
Kamal Alam, ‘In the Chaos of Syrian Geopolitics, Russia Remains Dominant’, RUSI Commentary, 15 May 2020; Michel Duclos, ‘Russia and Iran in Syria— a Random Partnership or an Enduring Alliance? An interim report’, Atlantic Council, June 2019.
Jennifer Cafarella with Jason Zhou, cit., 14.
Jennifer Cafarella with Jason Zhou, cit., 14.
Interview with A***, special adviser to Bashir al Assad, Damascus, December 2016.
Kirill Semenov, a non-resident researcher at the Russian International Affairs Council, cit. in Ammar Hamou, ‘Five years after the Russian military intervention, Iran’s influence in Syria is growing’, Syria Direct, October 5, 2020.
Interview with A***, special adviser to Bashir al Assad, Damascus, 26 December 2016.
Crisis Group, ‘Russia’s Choice in Syria’, Middle East Briefing N°47, Istanbul/New York/Brussels, 29 March 2016, 3-4.
Crisis Group, cit., 4.
Interview with Officer Ahmad Bayoush, 5th Corps in Idlib, January 2024.
Aron Lund, ‘Stand Together or Fall Apart: The Russian-Iranian Alliance in Syria’, Carnegie Middle East Center, May 31, 2016.
Jennifer Cafarella with Jason Zhou, cit.
Interview with **, senior official, Syrian Arab republic, Damascus, October 2017; Omar Alradad, ‘Could Assad and Russia Expel Iran from Syria?’, Washington Institute, June 25, 2018.
Cit. in Bick, cit.
Charles Lister, ‘Russia signals growing dissatisfaction with Syria’s Assad regime’, Washington : Middle East Institute, May 7, 2020.
Interview with General N*, Iranian army, Syria, January 2016.
Ibid.
Interview with **, senior official, Syrian Arab republic, Damascus, October 2017.
Interview with A***, special adviser to Bashir al Assad, Damascus, December 2016.
Interview with colonel **J, advisor for Syrian Government and Fatimyun group, February 2017.
Interview with **, senior official, Syrian Arab republic, Damascus, October 2017.
Interview with Hezbollah adviser, Syria, February 2018.
Interview with **, senior Syrian official, Damascus, October 2017.
Interview with senior Syrian Government official, July 2017.
Interview with M*, presidential advisor, Damascus, April 2018; Interview with Colonel H*, IRGC, Syria, April 2018.
- Sergei Tikhonov
- Ksenia Zinder