No, U.S. Taxpayers Are Not Funding “Censorship” in Ukraine
Claims of nefarious USAID role rely on half-truths and distortions.
WHILE CRUCIAL U.S. MILITARY ASSISTANCE to Ukraine continues to be held hostage by Trump-adoring Republican obstructionists in Congress, a right-wing media outlet in tandem with a maverick left-wing journalist has launched a broadside against a different kind of American aid to Ukraine: funding for Ukrainian media organizations by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The article by Lee Fang, posted on both RealClearInvestigations and Fang’s own Substack, claims that American taxpayer dollars are being used not only to subsidize Ukrainian government propaganda and disinformation but to support “censorship laws and shutdowns of dissident outlets” and efforts “to silence critics of the war, including many American citizens.”
Besides seeking to discredit U.S. aid to Ukraine, the article promotes a familiar anti-Ukraine narrative: that, far from being a democracy under attack by an authoritarian imperial power, Ukraine is itself an authoritarian regime.
The state of journalism in Ukraine is certainly not beyond criticism—though any criticism must acknowledge that Ukraine is a country fighting back against a brutal war of aggression in which disinformation and propaganda are key weapons. Under these circumstances, not even the most flawless democracy would protect untrammeled free speech rights. (That includes the United States during both world wars, despite the fact that there were no enemy soldiers on U.S. soil in either conflict.) But Fang’s would-be exposé is woven together from innuendo, distortions, and omissions of key information.
Perhaps the most striking example of this distorted narrative is the treatment of Ukraine’s sweeping Law on Media—in Fang’s narration, an authoritarian monstrosity intended to “crack down on media rights,” in particular “granting a council controlled by [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky and his allies to ban media outlets without a court order.” Fang writes that while Ukrainian and international journalists’ organizations, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, denounced the law as an assault on free speech and journalistic freedom, “USAID-funded media groups provided pivotal support” for the law, helped ensure its adoption in December 2022, and defended it against criticism after it was passed.
It’s certainly true that Ukraine’s media law would not survive First Amendment scrutiny in U.S. courts. Large parts of the law are intended to bring Ukrainian legislation into alignment with European Union norms on such issues as transparency of media ownership, and some of those norms—such as legal restrictions on hate speech and disinformation—don’t meet American free-speech standards. However, USAID’s objective is not to help Ukraine become the fifty-first American state; it is, among other things, to help Ukraine achieve its goal of European integration. Other parts of the media law go beyond EU requirements, and some have raised legitimate concerns about overly broad government powers: for instance, the law gives Ukraine’s National Council on TV and Radio Broadcasting the authority to regulate not only radio and television but print and online media. (Council members are selected by the president from a shortlist provided and vetted by media organizations and by journalists’ unions, then confirmed by a government-appointed commission.)
However, Fang’s description of the law outright misstates some facts: Notably, the law does not allow the council to “ban media outlets without a court order,” only to suspend or block them—but temporarily, for up to two weeks. Fang also omits the fact that following criticism of the draft law in the summer of 2022, it underwent “extensive amendments,” according to a report prepared by legal experts for the Council of Europe; many of the disputed provisions were rolled back or relaxed. A major organization advocating press freedoms, Reporters Without Borders, hailed the law’s adoption in its final form, while noting that more work was needed to “guarantee the regulator’s full independence and . . . professionalism.” The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) remained critical of the media law even following the amendments. But it is worth noting that NUJU itself has partnered with USAID, so the notion that the agency enforces a party line in support of the media law doesn’t hold up. It is no less notable that since the legislation’s passage, members of the regulatory council have repeatedly met with NUJU chapters to allay members’ concerns despite the group’s often scathing criticism of the law—hardly the behavior of an authoritarian regime.
If there are any instances of the media law being used to suppress or silence Zelensky critics, Fang doesn’t offer any. His claim that “dissident outlets” are being shut down—and with the connivance of USAID-funded media—focuses exclusively on the Ukrainian government’s decision in February 2021 to shut down three television channels owned by Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Russian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, “over allegations of Kremlin ties.” Fang notes that at the time, the USAID-funded watchdog site Detector Media ran a piece arguing that the move was not an attack on free speech because the channels were aiding and abetting “Russian aggression against Ukraine.” (While the Russian invasion was more than a year away, Russian aggression against Ukraine, via sponsorship of the separatist “insurgencies” in the east, had been continuous since March 2014.)
Here’s what Fang leaves out: Medvedchuk is widely known to be a Vladimir Putin crony. Placed under house arrest on treason charges in Ukraine in May 2021, he was sufficiently important to the Kremlin be traded, in September 2022, for a large batch of Ukrainian prisoners including more than a hundred fighters from the Azov Regiment. Putin, who is godfather to Medvedchuk’s youngest daughter, reportedly approved the 215-for-55 swap despite objections from his own security service. Medvedchuk is also widely believed to have been Putin’s pick for puppet president of a conquered Ukraine.
The Detector Media piece Fang mentions meticulously documents the ways in which the Medvedchuk-owned TV channels relentlessly churned out Kremlin propaganda: They reviled Ukraine’s Russia-skeptical government as “state criminals” while valorizing the pro-Russian separatist enclaves as the “Donbas that didn’t surrender”; they often silenced guests who didn’t get with the program and even cut their comments from recorded shows; they deep-sixed materials critical of Putin.
The Ukrainian government offered further, non-content-based grounds for the sanctions against the Medvedchuk media empire: alleged financing from Russia and “collaboration with terrorists” (the Donbas separatists). Were these charges true? It should be said that even some people with no sympathy for Medvedchuk were troubled by the lack of transparency in providing evidence. (The allegations stemmed from an investigation by the SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, whose results were not publicly disclosed.) Indeed, the non-transparency was criticized by people from a USAID-subsidized organization on Fang’s bête noire list, the Institute of Mass Information. But to treat the Medvedchuk channels as dissident media outlets persecuted for their views is misleading to say the least.
NO ONE WOULD DENY that the media in Ukraine face pressures and obstacles at home (even if those problems pale before the victimization of journalists on the frontlines and in Russia-occupied territories, including killings and disappearances). But Fang’s claim that “journalists taking a critical look at the government are facing intimidation and threats” leaves out vital information once again. Fang cites a Columbia Journalism Review article which has described two such incidents: the harassment of investigative journalist Yuri Nikolov by two or more men who tried to break into his apartment and shouted verbal abuse, and the leaking (possibly by government agencies) of anonymous videos showing private drug use by journalists from the anti-corruption media outlet Bihus.Info. But Fang omits the next part of the article:
Prosecutors in Kyiv claim to have identified the men responsible for harassing Nikolov, while Ukraine’s security services say they are investigating the Bihus.Info surveillance. In an address to the nation last week, Zelensky insisted that action was being taken—a message he reiterated in an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 over the weekend—and that “any pressure on journalists is unacceptable.”
CJR reports that many Ukrainian journalists are still worried despite the reassurances, and that’s understandable (especially since Nikolov has complained that his harassers were quickly released with only minor charges filed against them). Even so, the government’s response is a relevant part of the picture. Also relevant: The USAID-funded outlet the New Voice of Ukraine, which is also on Fang’s list of U.S.-backed baddies, has extensively covered the harassment targeting both Nikolov and the Bihus site.
This is far from the only instance of the media organizations Fang vilifies as U.S.-funded obedient tools of an authoritarian Kyiv regime speaking out against domestic pressures on journalists. The Institute of Mass Information has harshly criticized the post-invasion consolidation of television channels under state auspices, as well as the excessively pro-government slant of television coverage. IMI executive director Oksana Romaniuk has even told the New York Times that Ukrainian TV news was in danger of mimicking Russian propaganda, adding, “We should think about defending democracy in times of war.”
EUAN MACDONALD, A BBC FREELANCER living in Kyiv and an almost 30-year veteran of English-language media in Ukraine, calls Fang’s depiction of the Ukrainian media scene “absurd.” In reality, MacDonald told me, “Salaries are tiny, media are struggling from day to day to survive. The idea that the industry is somehow now awash with U.S. cash is laughable, as is the claim that Ukrainian journalists would slavishly pump out U.S. propaganda.”
And what of Fang’s charge that the U.S.-backed media organizations in Ukraine are somehow censoring critics of the war, including Americans? Apparently, the censorship he has in mind consists of identifying people who have “forcefully criticized dominant narratives around the war” as part of a “network of Russian propaganda” and propagators of Russian disinformation.
Who are those people? “Economist Jeffrey Sachs, commentator Tucker Carlson, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer,” as well as journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté and former presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy. As always, Fang’s account is cherry-picked: He writes that “Sachs is a highly respected international development expert who has angered Ukrainian officials over his repeated calls for a diplomatic solution to the current military conflict” and who has given a speech on the subject at the United Nations. Not mentioned: Sachs’s slightly less reputable repeated appearances on the TV program of Russia’s most odious propagandist, Vladimir Solovyov, who routinely calls for the mass murder of Ukrainians, the razing of Ukrainian cities, and bombings of European capitals. As for the other people on Fang’s list, all of them, with the possible exception of Mearsheimer, consistently recycle Kremlin talking points on Ukraine. One would think that after Carlson’s trip to Moscow in February, describing him as part of the Russian propaganda network would be entirely uncontroversial.
Predictably, Fang’s article has already been co-opted into the same propaganda effort: RT (formerly Russia Today) has amplified it to claim that “so-called ‘Independent’ media are being paid by USAID and NED to advance Kiev’s narratives and silence critics.”
The state of journalism in Ukraine is certainly a legitimate cause for concern; the fact that protecting press freedoms in a country at war is difficult doesn’t make it less important. Whether these freedoms should extend to de facto enemy propaganda is certainly debatable; while Fang seems to assume that alternative viewpoints should always be protected even in wartime, Tokyo Rose and Ezra Pound could tell us otherwise. But Fang’s article goes far beyond an examination of such issues and amounts to a dishonest attack on a vulnerable if flawed democracy. Fang is a journalist with a long progressive pedigree who has prided himself on independence from partisan and ideological tribalism. With this article, he crosses the line into morally vacant contrarianism.