March 4, 2025 (EIRNS)—"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 is the conclusion of Ukrainian dissident Dmitri Kovalevich, after reviewing the reports of the programs which USAID had been funding in Ukraine before the Trump administration froze its funding in January.
His review of USAID funding in his country, published Feb. 19 by the Delphi Initiative (self-described 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"), is revealing.
Take the case of the 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 how Melaniya Podolyak, project manager of the Institute of Education, itself an ultra-nationalist organization that exists solely thanks to USAID funding, laments that “now, because of the funding suspensions, there will be no further podcasts by Karas.”
With the independent media shut down by the Zelenskyy regime in 2021, most Ukrainians did not know that “many officials and journalists in Ukraine [are] little more than paid agents of the United States government,” Kovalevich points out. 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!
