In Ukraine, USAID aids US hegemony

The Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has imperiled global relief programs that rely on US funding. While the State Department has issued exemptions for life-saving programs, recipients of US foreign assistance, such as HIV treatment groups in South Africa, remain in limbo.

With their rapid dismantling of a major aid program, Trump and his oligarch consigliere, Elon Musk, are hurting lives and livelihoods across the planet, all while further consolidating power in an unaccountable elite circle.

Yet an honest appraisal must also reckon with the fact that USAID is not strictly a humanitarian operation, but a vehicle to destabilize some of the very countries it claims to help. Concurrently, to manufacture consent for US meddling abroad, USAID and related government programs have subsidized propaganda aimed at the US taxpayers footing the bill.

Today, the most expensive and arguably most damaging USAID project has come in Ukraine and Russia, where the agency has been an integral part of a longstanding US government strategic effort to weaken Moscow.

In his memoirs, Michael McFaul, the neoconservative former US Ambassador to Russia, described USAID’s evolution. “In the 1990s,” he wrote, “USAID in Russia focused primarily on fostering economic reform and economic development,” a reference to the privatization spree that handed state assets to well-connected insiders while nearly two-thirds of Russia’s people fell into deprivation. However, McFaul added, after Vladimir Putin took power and oversaw Russia’s economic resurgence – all while challenging NATO expansion and broader US hegemony — USAID “shifted its shrinking resources over time to a greater focus on democracy-assistance programs. By the time I arrived in Moscow as ambassador, roughly half of its programs to Russia focused on civil society, rule of law, or other programs aimed at fostering democracy and human rights.”

With US money flowing directly to opposition groups and NGOs, the Kremlin saw the US government’s “democracy-assistance” as an affront to its sovereignty and banned USAID in 2012. McFaul now boasts that Russia shut down USAID because it “supported free markets, democracy, human rights — ie causes that threatened Putin’s dictatorship.”

An Obama administration colleague, Ben Rhodes, acknowledged that these US “causes” included regime change. In his memoir, Rhodes recounted the talks between President Obama and Vladimir Putin after the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in the February 2014 Maidan coup. According to Rhodes, Putin believed that “the protests that overthrew Yanukovych were initiated by the United States because some of its leaders received grants from U.S. democracy promotion programs.” Rhodes saw no apparent contradiction in funding protest leaders in the name of “democracy promotion” who ultimately “overthrew” an elected president. As an avid promoter of allegations that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election, he also saw no hypocrisy in joining a Beltway meltdown about alleged “Russian interference” while directly funding participants in a coup on Russia’s border.

As the Maidan protests were swelling in December 2013, senior State Department Victoria Nuland disclosed that “democracy promotion” came with a hefty price tag. The US government, Nuland bragged, has “invested more than $5 billion” to help pro-Western “civil society” groups achieve a “secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.” By its own count, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US government-funded organization that works closely with USAID after being spun out of the CIA, reported spending over $20 million on 65 Ukrainian projects in 2013-14. This investment gave the US “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired,” veteran journalist Robert Parry, who helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, observed.

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 in 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 “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.

In touting their assault on USAID, Musk and Trump have both claimed that the agency is a tool of the “far left.” In reality, as the case of Ukraine illustrates, the agency is a tool of a bipartisan foreign policy establishment that pursues an interventionist foreign policy often to the benefit of reactionary, far-right forces in the targeted countries. By focusing on what they call “far-left” and “woke” targets, there is little indication that Musk and Trump are opposed to USAID’s historically neoconservative agenda. If they were, they would also cut the funding of groups like the International Republican Institute, another Congressionally funded entity that advances US meddling.

Musk and Trump bear responsibility for any suffering that results from their cuts to USAID’s genuine humanitarian functions. Those efforts, however, should not be conflated with those parts of the agency that have nothing to do with humanitarianism, but hegemony.