host: on your screen is annie boyajian of freedom house, which is what?: where a nonprofit organization that works on democracy and human rights around the world. host: how are you funded? guest: public donations and private donations. we do advocacy research and programming. our advocacy researcher -- our advocacy research is primarily privately funded. -- host: the u.s. is one of the funders. what does the u.s. contribute? guest: about 80% of our budget. host: according to the freedom house 20 to report, the threat to democracy is the product of 16 years of decline in global freedom. 60 country suffered declines while only 25 improved. as of today, some 30% of the global population live in what you call not free countries, the highest portion since 1997. only 20% now live in free countries. can you talk to that? guest: i can. we have tracked another year of decline in democracy around the world. this is been driven by authoritarians becoming increasingly aggressive at home. we also see increasing extension of that repression abroad. we have countries th

host: annie boyajian prior to the region -- prior to the invasion, where did you rank ukraine? guest: we have ranked as partly free. we have noted struggles with corruption but ukraine was on the right path. they had worked to start addressing those challenges. they had voted out folks who had been taking the country on a challenging path. unfortunately the progress they had been making is now -- they are focused on the war there. host: at the university of chicago former president obama spoke about russian and vladimir putin. here is what he had to say. >> vladimir putin represented a very particular reaction to the ideals of democracy, but also globalization, the collision of cultures, the ability to harness anger and resentment around an ethic known nationalist pathology, and what we are seeing is the consequences of that kind of toxic mix in the hands of an autocratic government that does not have a lot of checks and balances. i think it is also fair to say that it a bracing reminder for democracies that had gotten flabby and confused and feckless around the stakes of thing