A picture containing text

Description automatically generated
NED Democracy Award, a small-scale replica of the Goddess of Democracy that was constructed in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, during the student movement for freedom and democracy in 1989. [Source: ned.org]

Check out this year’s “Democracy Awards” handed out by the National Endowment for Democracy. They were presented to Ukrainian NGOs that specialize in creating manipulative “psyops” and fake “atrocity porn” designed to inflame public opinion against Russia.

On June 8, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) awarded its annual “Democracy Award” to “partner organizations” whose purpose is to mobilize public opinion in support of an escalation of U.S. military involvement in Ukraine.

Graphical user interface

Description automatically generated with medium confidence
Directors of NGOs receiving 2022 NED Democracy Award. (Clockwise from top left) Daria Kaleniuk, Oleksandra Matviychuk, Nataliya Gumenyuk, Anna Bondarenko. [Source: twitter.com]

The NED is a CIA offshoot founded in the early 1980s to support NGOs and political parties loyal to the U.S. and to advance U.S. propaganada. Virtually all its funding comes from the U.S. government, specifically earmarked by an act of Congress.

William Blum, one of the founders of CovertAction Magazine, called the NED “a Trojan Horse agency” because it pretends to promote democracy while secretly working to undermine it.

William Blum
William Blum [Source: williamblum.org]

In the 1980s, the NED provided $140 million to dissident groups in the Soviet Union in an attempt to facilitate its downfall. Since 1989, the NED has financed 103 organizations in Ukraine with the goal of prying Ukraine away from Russia and into the Western orbit.

NED-supported groups—including those receiving this year’s “Democracy Award”—were a key force behind the 2014 coup overthrowing the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych and now play a key role in trying to sustain the regime of Volodymyr Zelensky and defeat Russia, including by waging a worldwide propaganda war against it.

Reviving a Cold War Atmosphere

The attempt to revive a Cold War-type atmosphere was apparent at the “Democracy Award” ceremony on June 8 where Ronald Reagan was invoked as a hero by Kenneth Wollack, the NED’s Chairman of the Board, and by the NED’s CEO, Damon Wilson, a former Executive Director of the anti-Russia, pro-NATO Atlantic Council and a U.S. embassy official in Baghdad during the Iraq War.

Senator James Risch (R-ID), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, compared the Ukrainian struggle to that of the American colonies fighting Great Britain in 1776 while conflating modern-day Russia with the Soviet Union.

NED Director Calls for Regime Change in Russia

Damon Wilson said that the NGOs receiving the NED’s Democracy Award “exemplify the heroic struggle, courage and determination of millions of Ukrainians who risk everything to defend freedom and democracy.”

Ukraine though is not a functioning democracy: President Zelensky has banned eleven opposition parties and increased the power of Ukraine’s security services which have enacted an extra-legal campaign to arrest and in numbers of cases execute civilian officials advocating peaceful rapprochement with Russia.

In a February 27 rally at the White House, Wilson advocated for the “largest solidarity package the world has seen since the Marshall Plan” to “stop Putin’s aggression,” claiming that a “generational movement” was required to “defeat his tyranny.”

Wilson concluded his speech by stating that “only when Putin is out of Ukraine, only when Putin is out of the Kremlin, will our freedom be safe and secure. Slava Ukraini!”

In short, Wilson was advocating for regime change within Russia—in violation of Russian sovereignty.

Watch: NED President and CEO Calls for Solidarity at Rally to Support  Ukraine in Washington, D.C. - NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR DEMOCRACY
Damon Wilson addresses pro-Ukraine rally on February 27, 2022, in front of White House demanding that the U.S. send more weapons and advance regime-change efforts in Russia. [Source: ned.org]

Anti-Corruption Action Center

One of the NED Democracy Award recipients, the Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC) has shifted its focus during the war from anti-corruption investigations to trying to “bring global awareness to atrocities committed by Russia in Ukraine.”

The AntAC has also adopted a “Block Putin Wallets” campaign, whose purpose is to “raise awareness of how Kremlin-linked wealth buys influence in Western democracies.”

The campaign, with NED support, has employed a team of analysts that helped to locate the property of Russian oligarchs loyal to Vladimir Putin. It in turn pushes for the freezing and confiscation of their assets and aims to stop the flow of money allegedly being used to finance the war in Ukraine.

Timeline

Description automatically generated with low confidence
[Source: putinwallets.org]

The “Block Putin Wallets” campaign is part of a propaganda effort—in support of the U.S. sanctions policy—that obscures the structural forces driving corruption worldwide and the fact that Putin actually took measures to curb corruption under his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, which resulted in large part from an ill-conceived privatization initiative promoted by the U.S.

Map

Description automatically generated
[Source: putinwallets.org]

The neo-McCarthyist undertones of the “Block Putin Wallets” campaign is apparent in the charge that Russia is subverting Western democracies and controls Western politicians who advocate for more cooperative policies with Russia.

The rhetoric fits a long-standing pattern in Western history—detailed in Guy Mettan’s book, Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017)—of playing up the threat of Russian subversion in order to justify Western imperialism.

Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria Audiobook By Guy Mettan cover art
[Source: audible.com]

Ironically, AntAC was itself investigated for corruption as part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet Republics had been improperly diverted—an investigation which the Obama administration had tried to squelch.

A person in a suit and tie

Description automatically generated with medium confidence
Pseudo-scholar Francis “The End of History” Fukuyama. [Source: demidigest.org]

AntAC’s supervisory board includes Francis Fukuyama, a Reagan-era State Department staffer who also sits on the NED’s board. He wrote the famous essay, “The End of History and the Last Man,” which celebrated the triumph of capitalism over communism following the end of the Cold War.

Another board member is Karen A. Greenway, a former FBI special agent. Greenway had led investigations into corruption in the inner-circle of Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader Viktor Yanukovych (2010-2014) and helped block the return of funds to him that had allegedly been stored in offshore banks.

Recovery of assets stolen by Yanukovych regime: FBI admit they could not  return even single dollar « News | Mobile version | Censor.NET
Karen A. Greenway [Source: censor.net]

From its founding in 2012, AntAC was focused on uncovering corruption in Yanukovych’s government as part of U.S. regime-change designs.

More recently, AntAC has targeted the Platform for Life, an opposition party consisting of many of Yanukovych’s supporters which favors negotiation with Russia.

AntAC claims that Platform for Life members are not only corrupt but have conducted “anti-Ukrainian activities” for years in order to “undermine Ukrainian independence and to strengthen Russian influence” in Ukraine.

The executive director of AntAC, Daria Kaleniuk, has taken to the airwaves of MSNBC to criticize U.S. President Joe Biden for his alleged “inaction” on Ukraine—despite his having sanctioned more than $54 billion in arms supplies to Ukraine this year—and to lobby for more weapons and intervention from the West.

A graduate of the Chicago-Kent College of Law and fellow at the World Economic Forum where she was a young Global leader in 2004, Kaleniuk came to international media prominence when she asked British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at a press conference in Warsaw why Johnson did not support the establishment of a no-fly zone over Ukraine that would have started World War III.

Characterizing Putin’s regime as “totalitarian,” Kaleniuk’s political extremism was further apparent in her call in 2020 in the Kyiv Post for “economic sanctions directed against all “anti-Western MPs in Ukraine”—meaning MPs who did not want to acquiesce to the transformation of Ukraine into a vassal state of the EU, U.S. and NATO.

In her view, these politicians committed the sin of promoting a “consistent series of messages designed to undermine Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic integration.”

A group of people posing for a photo

Description automatically generated with medium confidence
Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC) Director Daria Kaleniuk, second from the right, and other Ukrainian activists meet with Senator Mitch McConnell. [Source: ned.org]

Center for Civil Liberties

The Center for Civil Liberties (CCL) is another NED grantee and Democracy Award recipient that has been at the forefront of the propaganda war over Ukraine.

A key part of its mission is to document Russian war crimes in Donbas— though Ukraine has been responsible for the majority of human rights crimes there since the war started after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014.

Residents from towns in eastern Ukraine have reported on widespread rapes and torture of captured prisoners by Ukrainian troops and constant shelling of civilian centers and terror bombing over an eight-year period.

This is ignored by the CCL, which instead has tried to spotlight the stories—real or imagined—of victims of sexual violence by Russian troops in Ukraine and women abducted by Russian troops and taken into captivity in Russia.[1]

The CCL has further mounted an international campaign to release the Kremlin’s political prisoners, and aims to raise awareness about political persecution in what it calls Russian-occupied Crimea—though Crimeans voted to rejoin Russia in a referendum following the 2014 Maidan coup.

CCL staffers with yellow vests out to investigate Russian war crimes. [Source: ned.org]

CCL Director Oleksandra Matviychuk—whose Twitter account featured a photo of Vladimir Putin looking like Adolf Hitler and says that Russia started the war in Ukraine in 2014 by invading Crimea and Donbas—co-authored a study “The Fear Peninsula: Chronicles of Occupation and Violations of Human Rights in Crimea.”

A person holding a sign

Description automatically generated
Oleksandra Matviychuk holds a sign which translates to “For Your and Our Freedom” as she protests in front of the Russian Embassy in Kyiv, Ukraine, on September 5, 2019. [Source: ned.org]
The Fear Peninsula: Chronicle of Occupation and Violation of Human Rights  in Crimea by Tetyana Pechonchyk
[Source: goodreads.com]

Much like AntACT, CCL helped support the 2014 Maidan coup by providing legal aid to demonstrators who were detained by Ukrainian security forces and by documenting human rights abuses of those security forces.

On its website, the CCL highlights the plight of a Belarusian journalist, Andrei Alexandrov, who was given a fifteen-year sentence for high treason by the Alexander Lukashenko government after he paid the fines of people who had been detained during foreign-sponsored protests designed to bring down Lukashenko’s government.

Lukashenko has been a target of U.S. regime-change and color revolution operations as one of Europe’s last remaining socialist leaders and a close ally of Vladimir Putin.

The CCL has also taken up the cause of Crimean Tatar political prisoners accused of high treason as a result of their connection to the Islamic party, Hizb ut-Tahrir, which the Russian Supreme Court declared a terrorist organization in 2003.

A picture containing text, newspaper, posing

Description automatically generated
CCL campaign to free Crimean Tatar prisoner Teymur Abdullayev who was accused of belonging to an Islamic terrorist organization. [Source: ccl.org]

Hizb ut-Tahrir is also banned in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Turkey and China, with former British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron calling for its banning in the UK. Hizb ut-Tahrir has supported the overthrow of governments and its literature supports suicide bombings in Israel.

While the CCL on the whole addresses some real injustices, its political agenda is apparent in the causes it takes up—which dovetail perfectly with U.S. imperial interests and efforts to demonize and weaken Russia, and advance NATO.

“Countering the Russian Propaganda Machine” with Its Own Propaganda

Characterizing itself as a partner of the NED, the Public Journalism Lab (PJL) has set out to counter what it terms the “Russian propaganda machine” by offering one-sided propaganda of its own which heroizes the Ukrainian side in the war and spotlights alleged Russian war crimes.

The PJL’s director, Nataliya Gumenyuk—who previously worked for the NED-funded Hromadske TV and wrote a book that was shortlisted for a BBC book-of-the-year award entitled The Lost Island: Tales from Occupied Crimea (2020)—has promoted misleading information about alleged Russian atrocities at Bucha, suppressing evidence that suggests Ukrainian militias carried out executions there.

Gumenyuk, whose group feeds the Western media information about Ukraine, has been granted access to the pages of The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The Guardian to promote her viewpoint that “the [Ukraine war] is a black and white war,” with an “aggressor [Russia]” and a “democratic country defending itself.”

In one piece in The Guardian, Gumenyuk referred to Luhansk as being occupied by the Russians. However, its people voted for autonomy in a referendum and mostly welcomed Russian intervention after being subjected to years of atrocities and shelling by the Ukrainian army—something that Gumenyuk and her ilk never reported on.

Image: Nataliya Gumenyuk
Nataliya Gumenyuk [Source: wilsoncenter.org]

In Gumenyuk’s writings and those of other NED-sponsored luminaries, the Russians are always the occupiers and Ukrainians the liberators; the Russians commit all the atrocities and Ukrainians are the victims.

These designations are key to the “manufacture of public consent”—and psyops being waged on the U.S. public with their own tax dollars through the NED.


  1. Some of the stories of Russian rapes it should be noted were found to be fakes. The extent to which this has occurred is uncertain and there is no evidence that it has been sanctioned by any higher authorities in Russia.


CovertAction Magazine is made possible by subscriptionsorders and donations from readers like you.

Blow the Whistle on U.S. Imperialism

Click the whistle and donate

When you donate to CovertAction Magazine, you are supporting investigative journalism. Your contributions go directly to supporting the development, production, editing, and dissemination of the Magazine.

CovertAction Magazine does not receive corporate or government sponsorship. Yet, we hold a steadfast commitment to providing compensation for writers, editorial and technical support. Your support helps facilitate this compensation as well as increase the caliber of this work.

Please make a donation by clicking on the donate logo above and enter the amount and your credit or debit card information.

CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and your gift is tax-deductible for federal income purposes. CAI’s tax-exempt ID number is 87-2461683.

We sincerely thank you for your support.


Disclaimer: The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of the author(s). CovertAction Institute, Inc. (CAI), including its Board of Directors (BD), Editorial Board (EB), Advisory Board (AB), staff, volunteers and its projects (including CovertAction Magazine) are not responsible for any inaccurate or incorrect statement in this article. This article also does not necessarily represent the views the BD, the EB, the AB, staff, volunteers, or any members of its projects.

Differing viewpoints: CAM publishes articles with differing viewpoints in an effort to nurture vibrant debate and thoughtful critical analysis. Feel free to comment on the articles in the comment section and/or send your letters to the Editors, which we will publish in the Letters column.

Copyrighted Material: This web site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. As a not-for-profit charitable organization incorporated in the State of New York, we are making such material available in an effort to advance the understanding of humanity’s problems and hopefully to help find solutions for those problems. We believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. You can read more about ‘fair use’ and US Copyright Law at the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School.

Republishing: CovertAction Magazine (CAM) grants permission to cross-post CAM articles on not-for-profit community internet sites as long as the source is acknowledged together with a hyperlink to the original CovertAction Magazine article. Also, kindly let us know at info@CovertActionMagazine.com. For publication of CAM articles in print or other forms including commercial internet sites, contact: info@CovertActionMagazine.com.

By using this site, you agree to these terms above.


About the Author

9 COMMENTS

  1. I have done so far this year working online and am a full time student. I am using an online business opportunity that I have heard of that has made so scs02 much money. It’s really easy to use and I’m so glad I discovered it. Here is what I do.
    Copy For more details, visit ……………… http://payout11.cf

  2. I have done so far this year working online and am a full time student. I am using an online business opportunity that I have heard of that has made so scs02 much money. It’s really easy to use and I’m so glad I discovered it. Here is what I do.
    Copy For more details, visit ……………… http://jddm.2.vu/1

  3. I have done so far this year working online and am a full time student. I am using an online business opportunity that I have heard of that has made so much money. It’s really easy to use and I’m so glad I discovered it. Here is what I do.
    Copy For more details, visit ………………

  4. Yep between ned and open society the only lame stream corp. owned news we get in Amerika is nothing but Propaganda.

Leave a Reply