July 28, 2015; Guardian
On July 24th, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation declared that it would no longer make any grants in Russia after it emerged that it had been included on that country’s list of potential “undesirables.”
In Russia, legislators have a longish hit list of organizations they would like to banish from their shores, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Carnegie Moscow Center, and the C.S. Mott Foundation. All of these NGOs have been placed on an unofficial “patriotic stop list” by legislators in Russia’s upper house of parliament under a new law that seeks to close NGOs that seem to pose a threat to the country’s national security. The law would provide for the government to close the offices of any foreign NGO deemed to “threaten the foundations of the constitutional order of the Russian federation.” Further, leaders of those organizations can be fined and imprisoned and the organizations themselves may be cut off from doing business with Russian banks. But although the MacArthur Foundation last week closed voluntarily