March 4—“Without years of funding from U.S. and European agencies and foundations, radical Ukrainian nationalism and neo-Nazism would still be a marginal phenomenon in Ukraine.” That was the conclusion reached by Ukrainian dissident Dmitri Kovalevich after reviewing the reports of the programs which USAID had been funding in Ukraine before that funding was frozen by the Trump administration in January.

USAID poured nearly $30 billion into Ukraine, from the February 2022 start of the war to the end of July 2024, according to Ukraine’s public broadcasting company, Suspilne. “It’s hard to think of a sector in Ukraine, where we have not had at least some involvement,” Biden’s USAID Director Samantha Power bragged to Suspilne. Of that,, “we’ve contributed close to $23 billion in just cash to the government,” she added.

EIR has exposed USAID’s role in financing and coordinating the Ukrainian thought-police apparatus established in Ukraine, in which the government’s Center for Countering Disinformation and private intelligence agencies such as Molfar OSINT coordinated their operations to identify people who oppose the drive for war against Russia or Ukraine’s Nazification, either inside Ukraine or internationally, so they can be silenced, politically or physically. As documented, that entire USAID apparatus are fanatic followers of the tradition of Nazi collaborator, Stepan Bandera.

The “Countering Disinformation Guide” jointly issued in Sept. 2021 by the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID, proudly reported that the “Media Program” which USAID initiated in Ukraine in 2018 to “empower local media,” had become “the largest media development activity in Ukraine’s history.”

Kovalevich’s review of USAID funding in Ukraine fills out the picture of what has resulted from those operations. Published Feb. 19 by the Delphi Initiative, which describes itself as “a network of mainly … European intellectuals who oppose the attempt of international Finance and big international corporations to impose a dictatorship all around Europe,” the full article is worth reading.

He takes the case, for example, of USAID funding of Yevhen Karas, a straight-out neo-Nazi killer, who heads one of the groups used to terrorize Ukrainians who oppose the Banderite regime the U.S. government installed in Kyiv. In March 2022, EIR published a profile of Karas, the leader of the neo-Nazi “C14” group founded in 2010 as the youth group of the openly Hitlerite, anti-Semitic Svoboda party (formerly named the “Social Nationalists”). Karas proudly boasted on a Feb. 5, 2022 panel (still available), that C14 had “been given so much weaponry” by the West, “because we perform the tasks set by the West, because we are the only ones who are ready to do them. Because we have fun, we have fun killing and we have fun fighting…. We have started a war that has not been seen for 60 years” against Russia.

Kovalevich reports that Melaniya Podolyak, project manager of the Institute of Education, itself an ultra-nationalist organization that exists solely thanks to USAID funding, he notes, laments that “now, because of the funding suspensions, there will be no further podcasts by Karas.”

Kovalevich points out that most Ukrainians did not know until the USAID funding was shut down that “many officials and journalists in Ukraine [are] little more than paid agents of the United States government,” because information was totally controlled by the USAID-funded media, after the Zelensky regime shut down independent or dissident media in 2021.

The revelations of USAID control over their country poured out when the recipients of its largesse began squealing over being cut off. The Judicial Administration of Ukraine received $16 million during 2023 and 2024, for example, he points out. Almost 90% (ninety percent!) of the government-allowed media “survives thanks to foreign grants”—the Institute of Mass Information, itself a USAID “grant-eater,” reported after surveying who had been hit.

Understandably, the revelations have stirred “a flurry of angry writings on social networks in Ukraine.” And especially so, because “all employees of Western-funded foundations in Ukraine enjoy rare exemptions from obligatory military conscription,” while being paid to promote the war against Russia.