Because of Trump’s funding freeze, the extent of that shadow media structure has newly come to light. According to Reporters Without Borders, USAID is the “the primary donor” for the nine out of 10 Ukrainian media outlets that rely on foreign funding. The head of one such outlet, Detector Media, told the Washington Post that “more than 50 percent” of the media organizations that receive foreign money are “dependent on American assistance.”
The Post headlined its story “Independent media in Russia, Ukraine lose their funding with USAID freeze.” According to the Post’s editorial standards, a foreign media outlet can presumably remain “independent” even while funded by the most powerful state in the world. To shore up its narrative, the Post argued that these US-funded outlets have “produced work often critical of their governments,” including the US client in Kyiv. Yet these same outlets have often promoted the US government’s agenda in Ukraine at the country’s expense.
One illustrative case came in March 2020, when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky took a major step towards implementing the Minsk accords, the February 2015 pact that sought to end Ukraine’s post-2014 civil war. In a landmark move, Zelensky agreed to hold direct talks with representatives of the breakaway Donbas republics – a major step towards Minsk’s implementation.
In a statement at the time, dozens of Ukrainian NGOs, political figures, and media outlets denounced Zelensky’s decision on the grounds that it would recognize the breakaway republics as equal partners, and play into the Russian narrative that Ukraine was facing an as an “internal conflict,” rather than “armed aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine.” According to Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski, the vast majority of Ukrainian groups that signed the list were funded by Western governments and foundations. These include the media outlets and organizations Detector Media, the Institute of Mass Information, and Internews-Ukraine, all of which are supported by USAID.
US-funded opponents of diplomacy are not just targeted at Ukrainian audiences. As journalist Lee Fang reports, USAID “has financed a network of groups in Ukraine that have spread unsubstantiated claims that American voices in favor of peace negotiations with Russia are agents of the Kremlin.”
US media outlets often interview these same groups and present them as independent voices without acknowledging their US state funding. To show how pervasive this is, even the stalwart progressive news show Democracy Now!, which has long challenged government propaganda, has been susceptible. Last month, DN! interviewed Ukrainian human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, who argued against diplomacy with Russia and advocated the “Reagan principle” of “peace through strength.” DN! failed to inform its audience that Matviichuk’s group, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, is funded by USAID, and that she is also on the Steering Committee of the “World Movement for Democracy,” a project of the National Endowment for Democracy. Reagan, whose administration founded the NED to advance the foreign policy objectives that DN! was founded to expose, would have approved.