For decades, USAID was one of the greatest tools America had to promote democratic values in Russia. The agency extended humanitarian assistance while fostering political reform, and in doing so endeared the United States to Russians even as it undercut the Kremlin’s authoritarian ambitions. It was a supreme example of soft power: working “through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion,” as the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. defined the term. Then, in 2012, the Kremlin expelled USAID, a decision that seemed to confirm just how effective it had been.

So effective, in fact, that Moscow has now decided to create its own version. The Trump administration shut down USAID on July 1; one week later, a Russian-government official revealed that the regime planned to establish a development agency modeled on the one Washington had just dismantled.

Russia senses an opportunity. Under Donald Trump, America has lost both the will and institutional capacity to counter authoritarianism abroad, and Moscow is already exploiting the vacuum that the president has left behind. Indeed, it has been using soft power for more than a decade to centralize its authority, sanitize its image, and accelerate its imperialist aims.

As a Ukrainian, I have seen firsthand how the Kremlin emulates Washington’s tactics, wielding them to undermine the same values they were meant to protect. Its plan to replicate USAID suggests that Moscow’s mimicry is only just beginning. The age of Russian soft power is here.

No country studied America’s use of soft power more closely than the Soviet Union. Its first lesson came early in the Cold War. In 1950, the CIA launched a covert operation in West Berlin called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which looked innocuous on paper: The group would invite scho