USAID Funded Ukraine Group That Smears Americans

The Trump administration has lambasted the foreign aid agency for absurd foreign expenditures, but Wyatt Reed says it has omitted what is perhaps its most scandalous operation.

By Wyatt Reed
The Grayzone

The U.S. government funded a Ukrainian military intelligence firm that smeared U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, U.S. Counterterrorism Director Joe Kent and Rep. Thomas Massie as “foreign propagandists of the Russian Federation.”

To this day, the online blacklist published by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Ukrainian group, known as Molfar, lists Vance, Massie and Kent as “foreign propagandists” aligned with the Russian government, and demands their “removal from public positions, the introduction of sanctions, and investigations into personal involvement in crimes.”

“These individuals pose a threat to the national security of countries that do not support the terrorist policy of the Russian Federation,” Molfar states.

Molfar’s website condemns Vance for having “compared Ukrainian democracy to Afghanistan” and stating that he “remains opposed to continuing to finance this war.” Perhaps worst of all, in the eyes of the Ukrainian information warriors, was his stance on Ukraine’s NATO aspirations: “He declared that Ukraine should not join NATO, because it would supposedly mean ‘inviting the American nation to go to war.’”

In 2022, a representative of Molfar was quoted by CNN accusing Trump of “absolutely pro-Kremlin” behavior because “Trump said that Crimea is Russian, because people speak Russian.”

Molfar, a Ukrainian term for a sorcerer or wizard, describes itself as an open-source intelligence agency which “collects lists of Ukrainian enemies to bring war criminals to justice.” Its website previously named both USAID and the U.S. Civil Research and Development Fund (CRDF) as “partners.” The legality of U.S. agencies sponsoring foreign groups to smear Americans and meddle in American politics is questionable at best.

A report bearing USAID’s logo, which was published one year after Russia’s invasion by Ukraine’s National Coordination Cybersecurity Center (NCSCC), noted that Molfar had helped train thousands of government employees on smear tactics, and were providing instruction on cyber warfare — including psychological operations (PSYOP) techniques — to public workers with the direct assistance of the U.S. government. 

“The NCSCC, with the support of the U.S. Civil Research and Development Fund (CRDF Global) and the U.S. Department of State, held the 3-day online training OSINT – intelligence using open sources,” the report stated.

“Together with leading practical researchers of the Ukrainian company Molar,” over 2,000 public workers “did practical assignments on the following topics: open-source searches, contact search, using Telegram bots, PSYOP and their use as a method of information warfare, image analysis, and human intelligence (HUMINT) or social engineering.”

In total, “USAID said that it will allocate $60 million” to “strengthen Ukraine’s cybersecurity,” the report’s authors wrote.

While smearing U.S. political leaders, Molfar has targeted numerous American journalists, including The Grayzone’s editor-in-chief, Max Blumenthal, whom it vowed to expose as a Russian agent in a message to hundreds of media contacts.

A mass email sent by Molfar’s public affairs director, Daria Verbytska, falsely accused Blumenthal of “adapting to russian narratives after magical expansion of income,” while promising to deliver a report on Blumenthal’s “approx income, its sources, fake CV info, cooperation with other propagandists, evidence, negative, connections with people worldwide, family, contacts, property and additional info.”

Molfar’s report amounted to a barely coherent collection of false, borderline libelous claims, accusing Blumenthal of “fake news” for making objectively true statements such as, “The US and NATO are sponsoring the war in Ukraine.”

However, the dossier contained his home address, the addresses of family members, and even those of their co-workers. USAID had therefore sponsored a doxxing operation which placed American citizens in danger for criticizing the Ukrainian government – and which targeted others simply for their association with Blumenthal’s family. 

In a report for the U.K.’s Morningstar Online, journalist Steve Sweeney documented how Molfar was “recklessly endangering lives by publishing a ‘traitors’ list with personal data, photographs and even family details of supposed Russian collaborators — including children.”

Others targeted by Molfar include tech mogul Elon Musk, journalists Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson and The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté, as well as economist and geopolitical commentator Jeffrey Sachs.

Shockingly, Molfar wasn’t the only group to receive funding from the U.S. government to create a blacklist accusing Americans of supposed thought crimes. 

Vox Populi, VoxUkraine

Information reviewed by The Grayzone indicates at least two other Ukrainian groups which attacked and smeared prominent journalists and senior Trump officials were directly subsidized by U.S. taxpayers: VoxUkraine, a prominent Ukrainian think tank and “fact-checker,” and the Center for Countering Disinformation, an official appendage of Ukraine’s national security council.

Those visiting VoxUkraine’s “history” page are greeted with the following question: “How has Vox Ukraine transformed from a blog run by a few enthusiasts into a think tank influencing millions of Ukrainians?” The answer, it turns out, is with millions of dollars from American taxpayers.

Formed amid the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, VoxUkraine claims it began as a crew of “four Ukrainian economists” who simply wanted “to elevate the level of economic discourse in Ukraine.” Impressively, as soon as it was formally incorporated in 2015, they managed to rake in nearly $2 million. The group’s annual report noted that a full “42% of the revenues of VoxUkraine” that year came from just one donor: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). 

Since then, VoxUkraine has undergone a massive expansion, with support from the U.S.-funded NED and USAID. Today, their website identifies their self-styled “fact-checking” operation, VoxCheck, as their “most prominent project.” 

As an official member of the so-called International Fact-Checking Network, whose parent company, Poynter, receives substantial funding from the NED, VoxCheck has featured prominently in mainstream media coverage of supposed Russian propaganda.

VoxCheck’s website, which lists 23 employees, reveals it received funding from the NED, the U.S. embassy and also Facebook, which commissioned the group as an official fact-checking partner of Meta in 2020.

Annual reports show that in 2021, they were nearly entirely reliant on money from Facebook, which made up 61 percent of their revenue stream. With the onset of the war in 2022, that number dropped to just 6 percent and funding again poured in from USAID and NED, which collectively provided 28 percent of VoxUkraine’s budget.

Beyond taking taxpayer money and censoring Americans’ social media posts, VoxCheck also worked with Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) to  compile another blacklist designed to impugn U.S. citizens as agents of Russia. In Feb. 2024, VoxUkraine and CCD jointly declared that they had “analyzed” the publications and speeches of “26 Western experts” and found that their “activities have signs of a network.”

Among others, the alleged “network” featured American journalists including this author, The Grayzone’s Blumenthal, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Clayton Morris, Brian Berletic, Douglas Macgregor, and leading academic experts Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer and Richard Sakwa.

USAID Sponsors Censorious Ukrainian Info Op

Joining VoxUkraine in Kiev’s official information war efforts is Ukraine’s official Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD). Established under Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2021 and operated under the auspices of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine, the CCD presents itself as a government-backed effort to prevent the spread of “destructive disinformation” and the “manipulation of public opinion.” 

Just a year after its founding, it was already hard at work smearing now-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard as being “on the Kremlin’s payroll.” In a Telegram post about Gabbard published in April 2022, CCD stated that “the enemy [Russia] continues to spread disinformation using recruited American politicians.”

That July, the official Ukrainian group again demonized U.S. public servants as borderline foreign agents, publishing a blacklist featuring both Gabbard and Sen. Rand Paul entitled, “Speakers who promote narratives that align with Russian propaganda.” Though the CCD refused to answer inquiries from American media organizations that pushed back, it quietly deleted the list in mid-August.

A week after Trump’s election in November 2024, the CCD deleted its original post about Gabbard. Not long after, the group attempted to backtrack, blaming an unspecified CCD employee for the fact that the site smeared a now-senior U.S. official for over two years, and claiming to have fired the responsible party: 

“The publications on Tulsi Gabbard did not meet the Center’s standards, as they were published without appropriate verification of information. … Given that the publications were published in 2022 and the individuals responsible for their publication were fired in 2023 — January 2024, the Center is deprived of the opportunity to hold the individuals accountable.”

The Ukrainian groups taking U.S. public funds to defame U.S. politicians often overlapped on their work, and formally coordinated on occasion. In October 2024, the Center for Countering Disinformation revealed it had signed a “memorandum of cooperation” with VoxUkraine, just eight months after announcing it had formed the same arrangement with Molfar in an effort to “strengthen the fight against disinformation.”

Molfar Targets Russians in the Field, Worsening Human Toll

While known in the West for denigrating opponents of war with Russia, Molfar has a different reputation in Ukraine, where it gained acclaim for tracking down Russian troops’ photos and geolocating their positions.

Headed by a CEO trained at the neoliberal Aspen Institute, and another chief officer who’s an official honorary IT ambassador of Ukraine, Molfar quickly emerged as one of the first digital private military contractors with a ticket on the proxy war gravy train, as Ukrainian intelligence solicited it to scour social media for hints of Russian soldiers’ whereabouts.

A fawning Foreign Policy profile released in 2023, which credited Molfar with pioneering new ways to use open-source intelligence to “proactively kill enemy forces and destroy enemy hardware on the battlefield itself,” noted that Molfar’s CEO “first made contact with Ukrainian intelligence prior to the war” at an unnamed security conference where Molfar was “invited to train new SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] recruits on OSINT [open source] techniques.”

“They told me that two weeks after our seminar, they were already able to find the location of Russian military and hit them,” [Molfar’s CEO Artem] Starosiek boasted.

By the summer of 2022, Molfar was putting those skills to work by delivering the exact coordinates of a supposed grouping of Chechen soldiers in the city of Rubizhnoye to the Ukrainian military. According to the firm, that information was subsequently used to deliver a HIMARS [high mobility artillery rocket system] strike.

Frequently, there’s a terrible human cost on the other end of the missile. In late 2022, this journalist spoke with an elderly survivor in Rubizhnoye whose apartment was decimated by a HIMARS strike in the weeks following Molfar’s tip.

A huge crater outside her second-floor window stood as a remnant of the carnage, while the interior of her home was coated with a thick layer of dust and broken glass. Freezing October winds blasted through the spaces where windows had been. Separated from her children by the war, she said she cried out for them every night.

The elderly woman condemned the Ukrainian “fascists” and said the Americans who supplied the HIMARS missile that took everything “must not be human.”

It wasn’t this journalist’s first run-in with Western-made weapons. Within two hours of his arrival at the landmark Donetsk hotel Donbass Palace a week prior, the building came under Ukrainian shelling. Could intelligence from Molfar, or a similar U.S.-backed agency, have played a role in targeting an American journalist as well?

US-Funded Censorship of Antiwar Voices

After the proxy war erupted in February 2022, weeks after former Secretary of State Antony Blinken dismissed Russian proposals for limiting NATO expansion out of hand, mainstream media outlets joined the Biden administration and EU leaders in cheerleading for the plucky Ukrainians.

But total domination of the domestic information space apparently wasn’t enough for Western leaders, who were determined to root out any potential vectors of the Russian narrative, beginning with state-backed media. After RT’s leadership was sanctioned, the channel was banished from U.S. airwaves, and readers in Europe blocked from accessing its website altogether.

Big Tech companies moved in to clear out any remaining perspectives that did not align with proxy war objectives. Commentators who agreed with criticisms of NATO expansionism found their posts algorithmically throttled by Facebook and Twitter (now X), while search engines pledged to de-boost videos and articles that were incongruous with the Ukrainian government’s positions.

In many cases, it appears that the CCD was behind these efforts. Two nearly-identical press releases issued by CCD following meetings with Google representatives in 2023 and 2024 thank the tech giant for “increasing the level of media education of state employees, identifying and blocking hostile YouTube channels that were funded by russia and spread disinformation in Ukraine and abroad, [and] supporting fact-checking organizations in Ukraine, etc.”

Together, CCD and Google pledged to “implement new innovative solutions in the field of countering disinformation, as well as to enhance work on increasing media literacy and the resistance of government employees and the public to disinformation.”

In September 2024, Google sponsored a Ukrainian fact-checking conference which featured speakers from all three groups — Molfar, the CCD and VoxUkraine — which produced blacklists of Americans with U.S. funds.

Despite overwhelming digital censorship, a handful of independent journalists have persisted in broadcasting from Russia to Western audiences online. And with U.S. government support, Ukrainian groups like Molfar have attempted to punish them for it.

Molfar Defends Neo-Nazi Unit Against US Journalist

One of the few journalists offering English-speaking audiences a glimpse of life in the areas of Donbass bombarded by U.S.-supplied weapons was independent American journalist Patrick Lancaster.

Lancaster was a former U.S. Navy intelligence officer who was living near the frontline in February 2022, uniquely positioned to report on the conflict. At an abandoned Ukrainian military base in Mariupol a month later, the journalist recorded some of the most disturbing footage seen since the war’s outbreak — the corpse of a woman who’d apparently been raped by Ukrainian nationalist forces, with a swastika burned into her stomach.

Images of the atrocity, likely committed by the notoriously pro-Nazi Azov Battalion which was headquartered in Mariupol before its capture by Russia, spread widely on social media.

Meanwhile, Western outlets instead ran with the story of an infamously mendacious Ukrainian legislator, who spun Lancaster’s footage as the work of the Russians to dozens of credulous reporters. It was then that the network of U.S.-funded Ukrainian “fact-checkers” sprang into action.

Within days, an article appeared on U.S.-funded VoxUkraine with the headline, “FAKE: A photo of a girl branded with a Swastika in Mariupol proves Azov’s crimes.” The post, which notes in large typeface that VoxUkraine carries out “Verification” as part of “Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program,” did not refute the claim of Ukrainian responsibility at all.

Instead, it simply alleged that Lancaster’s “video footage often appears on russian [sic] propaganda channels” and that “Lancaster often repeats russian [sic] propaganda narratives.”

Weeks later, a hit piece in Vice News, the Soros Fund Management-owned former hipster mag, seemed to confirm the aim had shifted from countering the claim to targeting Lancaster. Its author, self-styled “disinformation” reporter David Gilbert, opened the article by claiming that “evidence suggests that the soldiers who painted the swastika on the woman’s body were from Russia” — yet he provided none.

Unable to back up his claim, he homed in on Lancaster’s personal life, which seemed modest and relatively normal. These details were gathered through surveillance of Lancaster’s social media, and that of his family. According to Vice, that’s where Molfar stepped in.

“Social media posts reviewed by Molfar show that Lancaster’s wife initially refused to leave Donetsk at the outbreak of the war, but on March 14 moved to Russia with their two sons. Lancaster visited her there in April, according to a photo posted on his wife’s social media accounts.” In a separate post on Molfar’s page, they wrote that Lancaster’s publications “reflect the position of russian [sic] propaganda.”

Molfar’s admiration for Azov has shown little signs of abating. Months after attacking Lancaster for attributing horrific crimes in Mariupol to the fascist militants, Molfar released an article titled, “Why Azov are heroes, not terrorists: 3 explanations that even Russians will understand.”

In the piece, Molfar lauded the avowed neo-Nazis as “highly motivated patriots” who they called “the real Heroes of Ukraine.” In Mariupol, where the group carried out well-documented horrors against the civilian population, they insist Azov “only defended and retreated.”

In 2024, when Ukrainian officials decided to ramp up nationalism in Ukrainian classrooms, the Ministry of Digital Transformation presided over a formal partnership between Molfar and Azov.

Citing the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, one Ukrainian outlet wrote: “According to him, the Ministry of Education and Science developed the program for [teacher] trainers together with the military and civil society organizations – in particular, the Azov military, [and] the largest OSINT agency in Ukraine, Molfar.”

Despite Molfar’s partnership with a neo-Nazi unit of the Ukrainian military, which had once been proscribed by the U.S. Congress, USAID continued to subsidize the group’s activities. In August 2024, when USAID sponsored a “Hackathon” in Ukraine, they turned to Molfar CEO Starorsiek to judge the contest.

For over two years, USAID sponsored Kiev-based outfits like Molfar, CCD and VoxUkraine as they sought to destroy the reputations of U.S. politicians. Now that those officials occupy key national security positions in the Trump administration, as well as the vice presidency, is it any wonder they are determined to shut down the information warfare apparatus that defamed them as foreign agents?

Wyatt Reed is the managing editor of The Grayzone. As an international correspondent, he’s covered stories in over a dozen countries. Follow him on Twitter at @wyattreed13.