When US President Donald Trump announced the sweeping dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year, few imagined that one of the casualties would be an animated Ukrainian dog. Yet the abrupt cancellation of Patron the Dog, a children’s cartoon designed to educate youngsters about the dangers of land mines, has become an emblem of how Washington’s reorientation of aid priorities is reverberating in unexpected ways.

The series, which premiered on YouTube, featured a cheerful Jack Russell Terrier named Patron – Ukrainian for “bullet cartridge.” Based on a real-life bomb-sniffing dog from Ukraine’s State Emergency Service, Patron had become something of a national symbol. The cartoon followed his adventures rescuing forest animals from explosive hazards and teaching viewers how to identify and avoid dangerous remnants of war. By September, the show had attracted more than 223,000 subscribers.

But the production ground to a halt in the middle of its second season. According to scriptwriter Sasha Ruban, the project’s lifeline had always been international grants. “The project was funded by USAID and UNICEF,” she explained in an interview with Ukrainian News. “We managed to complete the first season, which had 11 episodes, and five episodes of the second. But then USAID was dismantled, and the money stopped.”

The end of Patron the Dog is a direct result of Trump’s aggressive crackdown on foreign aid programs since returning to the White House in January. Declaring that the agency had been “taken over by radical lunatics” and wasted US taxpayer dollars on “woke pet........

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