Harper’s Magazine, April 2025

From interviews given to a researcher by six Ukrainian women in May and June of last year and provided to Harper’s Magazine. The researcher’s identity has been withheld to protect the women’s safety.

i.

I’m from Kharkiv, a big industrial center in eastern Ukraine. It had been transformed in recent years, before the war—that means good roads, flower beds, lovely parks. It’s beautiful. It hurts me to know that missiles land in different parts of the city and people die. The people of Kharkiv are very tired. They’ve lived through war for more than two years. Kharkiv has filled up with people who came from small towns that were right in the line of military action. We are very close to the stations that launch missiles. So sometimes the missiles arrive first, and only then does the siren go off. No one pays attention to it anymore. People sitting in cafés keep on sitting there; people going to work keep on going to work. It is not normal for an ordinary person not to fear an explosion. People should live in peace, should develop, should go to work, should produce some products, should rest, should bring up children. Many of our children do not go to school, because there are so many destroyed schools. In addition, it is scary to send a child to school. There are only a few schools that have good bomb shelters where children study. They have even set up classrooms in the metro. Inside the subway, the passageway from one station to another is now taken up with desks.

It’s mostly older people, women, and children who ride the metro. There are very few men. It is very rare to meet a man of draft age. Recruiters go around all the places where you can meet people, handing out notices. Markets, stores, parking lots, parks, subways, buses, bus stations. These are all places where they can hand you a draft notice. Men are in the most powerless position. Because the only thing they are allowed to do is to go to war.

ii.

My friend sent me a photograph showing a vehicle belonging to the army recruitment division stopping cars and dragging out the men and taking them away. This is done by force. We call it “stealing people.” Women try to beat them back, mothers come to the enlistment center to get their sons, they make scenes, they fight. It’s led to such consequences: attacking the military personnel who are defending us, thinking that they work for the enlistment centers.

There are horrible things. I know of a situation in which a student was asked by his teacher to come in earlier. This boy was always late, he was always getting yelled at, but this time his mother got him organized and said, “Go, at least you’ll be on time for once.” He went, they took him to war, and he was dead a week later. I don’t think it will happen in the big cities, but it happens in the small towns because they are less able to stand up for themselves, they are more subordinate to the authority of men in uniforms than city dwellers. The trouble is that some small towns already have no men left, and they have very many cemeteries, and the cemeteries are full.

iii.

We visited schools near the front line. In those areas where the line went right through a town, we had to go with the children because they were afraid to go to school. They were afraid of the military, afraid of the air strikes. We simply talked with the little kids. One time, we arrived at a school, and the head teacher, who loved us and always waited for us to come and talk with the kids, was in a very bad psychological state herself. We talked with her and learned what was wrong. The day before, there was a big air strike in the center of the town, and they saw it hit a house; she and her husband ran over to see if anyone was alive in the house, if they could help. As she was running, something squished under her foot. She shone her flashlight on it and saw that she had run atop the remains of her old schoolmate. One minute she had been talking with friends and the next she ran over the body of a friend she had known since childhood and had just been talking to. Just the thought was horrifying. This woman came to the school the next day to help us organize help for the children—but who was there to help her?

iv.

If there is a man at war in a family, that adds a burden on women. Every day is filled with fear that there will be bad news. They live under regular air raids and experience extreme emotional tension, fear, and trauma. I often think about how women will have to restore Ukraine, because we are losing men. But women are so exhausted now that they may not have the strength.

Of course, there are also women whose men are not fighting. They hide these men at home, afraid they will be drafted. The social roles change: before, the man was the breadwinner, and the woman ran the house. Now women must go to work. There are cases in which women are forced to have a third child, because men with three children are not drafted.

The war leaves a mark on the behavior and emotional state of people, and violence can appear in families where it had not existed before. Teenagers, especially girls, are more vulnerable, especially in low-income families that live near military bases.

v.

There used to be an online map that showed strikes and destruction in Luhansk. One night when I was away, I couldn’t sleep, and I kept a tablet under my pillow, on which I kept checking the situation. Suddenly I saw a strike right next door to my address. I kept trying to call my father and couldn’t reach him. For a few days I thought I would lose my mind. And then my father called, his voice was cheerful, and I said, “Papa, how are you there? What’s going on?” He said, “I’m in Petrovske.” That’s a village not far from Luhansk. He said that there was so much shelling that it was impossible to stay at home. The house that was hit, next door, was where a babushka lived. I said, “How is she?” He said, “She had made some soup and took it over to an ailing neighbor, and that saved her.” It was a miracle.

vi.

War changes people. People who should not have killed, and were not born to kill, have a completely different view now, after the war. I find it very hard to look them in the eye.

I want to go back to the life I had before, but it’s not like that and it will never be like that again, so I don’t know. Yesterday, my friend asked me what my plans are for the next couple of years, and I realized that I don’t know how to make plans. It’s enough for me that I have a plan at least for a week, for a month. This is the distance in time that I can control, I can keep, and I can manage, because everything beyond that is hard to predict. I have acquaintances who are still filled with hope, but I think my only hope is that we do not die of hatred.

The Moscow Times, 4/21/25

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday praised the late Pope Francis as a “defender” of humanism and justice and lauded his efforts to foster dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

“Pope Francis enjoyed great international respect as a devoted servant of Christian teachings, a wise religious and state leader, as well as a steadfast defender of the highest ideals of humanism and justice,” read Putin’s statement, which the Kremlin published shortly after the Vatican announced the Pope’s passing.

“Throughout his papacy, he actively promoted dialogue between the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, as well as constructive engagement between Russia and the Holy See,” the statement added.

“I had the honor of meeting this remarkable man on multiple occasions, and I will always cherish the warmest memories of him,” Putin wrote in the statement.

The Kremlin leader met with Pope Francis in person three times — in 2013, 2015 and 2019 — and last spoke with him by phone in December 2021, just weeks before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to Russian state media.

Pope Francis had repeatedly called for peace in Ukraine, although he stirred controversy last year after urging Kyiv to “raise the white flag and negotiate.” Ukrainian officials reacted to those remarks with fury, even while the Vatican insisted the words “white flag” were intended to mean a cessation of hostilities, not a surrender.

Russia’s Catholic Church announced Monday afternoon that its churches across the country would hold prayer services for the late Pope.

“Starting today, in all our churches in Russia, there will, of course, be prayers for Pope Francis. We will remember and pray here, locally,” Auxiliary Bishop of Mother of God at Moscow Nikolai Dubinin told state media.

In 2016, Francis met Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill in Cuba, marking the first-ever meeting between the heads of the two churches. The historic encounter concluded with a joint 10-page declaration, hailed at the time as a milestone in relations between the Catholic and Russian Orthodox branches of Christianity.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 4/9/25

This is meant to symbolize the reduction of American military aid to Kiev, not function as the first step towards a complete withdrawal from Poland or Central & Eastern Europe as a whole.

The Pentagon announced on Monday that US forces will withdraw from Poland’s Rzeszow logistics hub for Ukraine and reposition elsewhere in the country according to (a hitherto undisclosed) plan. This was then followed the day after by NBC News reporting that Trump might soon withdraw half of the 20,000 US troops that Biden sent to Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) since 2022. According to their sources, the bulk will be pulled from Poland and Romania, the two largest countries on NATO’s eastern flank.

The Polish President, Prime Minister, and Defense Minister were all quick to claim that Monday’s repositioning doesn’t amount to nor presages a withdrawal of US forces from Poland, but speculation still swirls about Trump’s plans considering the nascent Russian–US “New Détente”. Putin requested in late 2021 that the US remove its forces from CEE so as to restore Washington’s compliance with the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act whose many violations worsened the Russian-US security dilemma.

Biden’s refusal to discuss this helped make the latest phase of the now over-decade-long Ukrainian Conflict inevitable by convincing Putin that what would soon be known as the special operation was the only way to restore the increasingly lopsided strategic balance between Russia and the US. Unlike Biden, Trump appears open to at least partial compliance with Putin’s request, which could become one among several pragmatic mutual compromises that they’re negotiating to normalize ties and end the proxy war.

It was assessed in late February that “Trump Is Unlikely To Pull All US Troops Out Of Central Europe Or Abandon NATO’s Article 5”, but he’ll probably withdraw some of them from there for redeployment to Asia in order to more muscularly contain China as part of his administration’s planned eastern pivot. There are currently around 10,000 US troops in Poland, up from approximately 4,500 before the special operation, so some could hypothetically be cut but still leave with Poland more than before 2022.

Poland’s outgoing conservative president wants as many US troops as possible, including the redeployment of some from Germany, while its incumbent liberal Prime Minister is flirting with the possibility of either relying on France to balance the US or outright pivoting towards the former. The outcome of next month’s presidential election will play a huge role in determining Polish policy in this regard and could be influenced by perceptions (accurate or not) of America abandoning Poland.

Any curtailment of US troops in Poland or the public’s belief that this is inevitable could play to the pro-European liberal candidate’s favor while an explicit confirmation of the US’ commitment to retain – let alone expand – the existing level could help the pro-American conservative and populist ones. Even if Poland’s next president is a liberal, however, the US might still be able to count on the country as its regional bastion of military and political influence if the Trump Administration plays its cards rights.

For that to happen, the US would have to retain more troops there than it had before 2022 even if some are withdrawn, ensure that this level remains above any other CEE country’s, and transfer some military technologies for joint production. The first imperative would psychologically reassure the politically Russophobic population that they won’t be abandoned, the second relates to their regional prestige, and the third would keep CEE within the US military-industrial ecosystem amidst EU competition.

This could be sufficient for counteracting the liberals’ possible plans to pivot towards France at the expense of the US’ influence or maintaining the US’ predominant position in Poland if a liberal President works with his like-minded Prime Minister to rely on France for balancing the US a bit. Even if the Trump Administration fumbles this opportunity due to a lack of vision or a fully liberal government in Poland picks fights with the US for ideological reasons, the US isn’t expected to completely dump Poland.

The vast majority of Poland’s military equipment is American, which will at the very least lead to the continued supply of spare parts and likely lay the basis for even more arms deals. US forces are also currently based in almost a dozen facilities across the country, and the advisory role that some play helps shape Poland’s outlook, strategies, and tactics during its ongoing military buildup. There’s accordingly no reason why the US would voluntarily cede such influence over what’s now NATO’s third-largest military.

As such, the most radical scenario of a full-blown liberal-led Polish pivot towards France would be limited by the impracticality of replacing American military wares with French ones anytime soon, with the furthest that this might go being the hosting of nuclear-equipped Rafale fighters. Poland could also invite some French troops into the country, including for advisory purposes, and maybe even sign a few arms deals. It won’t, however, ask US forces to leave since it wants to preserve their tripwire potential.

With the interplay of these interests in mind, it can be concluded that the US’ withdrawal from Poland’s Rzeszow logistics facility for Ukraine is meant to symbolize the reduction of American military aid to Kiev, not function as the first step towards a complete withdrawal from Poland or CEE as a whole. While some regional US troop reductions are possible as one among several pragmatic compromises that Trump might agree to with Putin for normalizing ties and ending the proxy war, a full pullout isn’t expected.

By William Hartung, Consortium News, 3/20/25

Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.

As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” 

His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence.

He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?”

And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands — in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”

Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is the genuine path to national salvation and he advocates a revival of the concept of “the West” as foundational for future freedom and collective identity. 

As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”

Count on one thing: Karp’s approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America’s current great power rival.

Militarism as a Unifying Force in a New Manhattan Project

Karp may be right that this country desperately needs a new national purpose, but his proposed solution is, to put it politely, dangerously misguided.

Ominously enough, one of his primary examples of a unifying initiative worth emulating is World War II’s Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs. He sees the building of those bombs as both a supreme technological achievement and a deep source of national pride, while conveniently ignoring their world-ending potential. And he proposes embarking on a comparable effort in the realm of emerging military technologies:

“The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control of the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield — the targeting systems and swarms of drones and robots that will become the most powerful weapons of the century.”

And here’s a question he simply skips: How exactly will the United States and its allies “retain exclusive control” of whatever sophisticated new military technologies they develop? 

The Badger nuclear explosion in 1953 at the Nevada Test Site. (Public domain, National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office)

After all, his call for an American AI buildup echoes the views expressed by opponents of the international control of nuclear technology in the wake of the devastating atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II — the futile belief that the United States could maintain a permanent advantage that would cement its role as the world’s dominant military power. 

Nearly 80 years later, we continue to live with an enormously costly nuclear arms race — nine countries now possess such weaponry — in which a devastating war has been avoided as much thanks to luck as design.

Meanwhile, past predictions of permanent American nuclear superiority have proven to be wishful thinking. Similarly, there’s no reason to assume that predictions of permanent superiority in AI-driven weaponry will prove any more accurate or that our world will be any safer.

Technology Will Not Save Us

Karp’s views are in sync with his fellow Silicon Valley militarists, from Palantir founder Peter Thiel to Palmer Luckey of the up-and-coming military tech firm Anduril to America’s virtual co-president, SpaceX’s Elon Musk. All of them are convinced that, at some future moment, by supplanting old-school corporate weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, they will usher in a golden age of American global primacy grounded in ever better technology. 

They see themselves as superior beings who can save this country and the world, if only the government — and ultimately, democracy itself — would get out of their way. Not surprisingly, their disdain for government does not extend to a refusal to accept billions and billions of dollars in federal contracts. 

Their anti-government ideology, of course, is part of what’s motivated Musk’s drive to try to dismantle significant parts of the federal government, allegedly in the name of “efficiency.”

An actual efficiency drive would involve a careful analysis of what works and what doesn’t, which programs are essential and which aren’t, not an across-the-board, sledgehammer approach of the kind recently used to destroy the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), to the detriment of millions of people around the world who depended on its programs for access to food, clean water and health care, including measures to prevent the spread of HIV-AIDS.

Musk with President Donald Trump outside the White House, March 11. ( White House /Molly Riley, Public domain)

Internal agency memos released to the press earlier this month indicated that, absent USAID assistance, up to 166,000 children could die of malaria, 200,000 could be paralyzed with polio and a million of them wouldn’t be treated for acute malnutrition. In addition to saving lives, USAID’s programs cast America’s image in the world in a far better light than does a narrow reliance on its sprawling military footprint and undue resort to threats of force as pillars of its foreign policy.

[CN: Eighty-percent of USAID was shut down before a  judge stopped it. USAID delivered coup d’etats, not just food.]

Past Miracle Weapons

As a military proposition, the idea that swarms of drones and robotic systems will prove to be the new “miracle weapons,” ensuring American global dominance, contradicts a long history of such claims. 

From the “electronic battlefield” in Vietnam to President Ronald Reagan’s quest for an impenetrable “Star Wars” shield against nuclear missiles to the Gulf War’s “Revolution in Military Affairs” (centered on networked warfare and supposedly precision-guided munitions), expressions of faith in advanced technology as the way to win wars and bolster American power globally have been misplaced. 

Either the technology didn’t work as advertised, adversaries came up with cheap, effective countermeasures, or the wars being fought were decided by factors like morale and knowledge of the local culture and terrain, not technological marvels. And count on this: AI weaponry will fare no better than those past “miracles.”

“They see themselves as superior beings who can save this country and the world, if only the government — and ultimately, democracy itself — would get out of their way.”

First of all, there is no guarantee that weapons based on immensely complex software won’t suffer catastrophic failure in actual war conditions, with the added risk, as military analyst Michael Klare has pointed out, of starting unnecessary conflicts or causing unintended mass slaughter.

Second, Karp’s dream of “exclusive control” of such systems by the U.S. and its allies is just that — a dream. 

China, for instance, has ample resources and technical talent to join an AI arms race, with uncertain results in terms of the global balance of power or the likelihood of a disastrous U.S.-China conflict.

Third, despite Pentagon pledges that there will always be a “human being in the loop” in the use of AI-driven weaponry, the drive to wipe out enemy targets as quickly as possible will create enormous pressure to let the software, not human operators, make the decisions. As Biden administration Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall put it, “If you have a human in the loop, you will lose.”

Automated weapons will pose tremendous risks of greater civilian casualties and, because such conflicts could be waged without putting large numbers of military personnel at risk, may only increase the incentive to resort to war, regardless of the consequences for civilian populations.

What Should America Stand For?

Technology is one thing. What it’s used for, and why, is another matter. And Karp’s vision of its role seems deeply immoral. The most damning real-world example of the values Karp seeks to promote can be seen in his unwavering support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. 

Not only were Palantir’s systems used to accelerate the pace of the Israeli Defense Force’s murderous bombing campaign there, but Karp himself has been one of the most vocal supporters of the Israeli war effort. He went so far as to hold a Palantir board meeting in Israel just a few months into the Gaza war in an effort to goad other corporate leaders into publicly supporting Israel’s campaign of mass killing.

Are these really the values Americans want to embrace? And given his stance, is Karp in any position to lecture Americans on values and national priorities, much less how to defend them?

Despite the fact that his company is in the business of enabling devastating conflicts, his own twisted logic leads Karp to believe that Palantir and the military-tech sector are on the side of the angels. In May 2024, at the “AI Expo for National Competitiveness,” he said of the student-encampment movement for a ceasefire in Gaza, “The peace activists are war activists. We are the peace activists.”

Invasion of the Techno-Optimists

And, of course, Karp is anything but alone in promoting a new tech-driven arms race. Musk, who has been empowered to take a sledgehammer to large parts of the U.S. government and vacuum up sensitive personal information about millions of Americans, is also a major supplier of military technology to the Pentagon. 

And Vice President J.D. Vance, Silicon Valley’s man in the White House, was employed, mentored and financed by Palantir founder Thiel before joining the Trump administration.

The grip of the military-tech sector on the Trump administration is virtually unprecedented in the annals of influence-peddling, beginning with Musk’s investment of an unprecedented $277 million in support of electing Donald Trump and Republican candidates for Congress in 2024. 

 Thiel in 2022 at an event  in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Gage Skidmore / Flickr/ CC BY-SA 2.0)

His influence then carried over into the presidential transition period, when he was consulted about all manner of budgetary and organizational issues, while emerging tech gurus like Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz became involved in interviewing candidates for sensitive positions at the Pentagon. 

Today, the figure who is second-in-charge at the Pentagon, Stephen Feinberg of Cerberus Capital, has a long history of investing in military firms, including the emerging tech sector.

But by far the greatest form of influence is Musk’s wielding of the essentially self-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to determine the fate of federal agencies, programs and employees, despite the fact that he has neither been elected to any position, nor even confirmed by Congress and that he now wields more power than all of Trump’s cabinet members combined.

As Alex Karp noted — no surprise here, of course — in a February call with Palantir investors, he’s a big fan of the DOGE, even if some people get hurt along the way:

“We love disruption, and whatever’s good for America will be good for Americans and very good for Palantir. Disruption, at the end of the day, exposes things that aren’t working. There will be ups and downs. There’s a revolution. Some people are going to get their heads cut off. We’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win.”

Even as Musk disrupts and destroys civilian government agencies, some critics of Pentagon overspending hold out hope that at least he will put his budget-cutting skills to work on that bloated agency. But so far the plan there is simply to shift money within the department, not reduce its near-trillion-dollar top line. 

And if anything is trimmed, it’s likely to involve reductions in civilian personnel, not lower spending on developing and building weaponry, which is where firms like Palantir make their money. 

Musk’s harsh critique of existing systems like Lockheed’s F-35 jet fighter — which he described as “the worst military value for money in history” — is counterbalanced by his desire to get the Pentagon to spend far more on drones and other systems based on emerging (particularly AI) technologies.

Of course, any ideas about ditching older weapons systems will run up against fierce resistance in Congress, where jobs, revenues, campaign contributions and armies of well-connected lobbyists create a firewall against reducing spending on existing programs, whether they have a useful role to play or not. 

And whatever DOGE suggests, Congress will have the last word. Key players like Sen. Roger Wicker have already revived the Reaganite slogan of “peace through strength” to push for an increase of — no, this is not a misprint! — $150 billion in the Pentagon’s already staggering budget over the next four years.

What Should US National Purpose Be?

Karp and his Silicon Valley colleagues are proposing a world in which government-subsidized military technology restores American global dominance and gives the U.S. a sense of renewed national purpose. 

It is, in fact, a remarkably impoverished vision of what the United States should stand for at this moment in history when non-military challenges like disease, climate change, racial and economic injustice, resurgent authoritarianism and growing neo-fascist movements pose greater dangers than traditional military threats.

Technology has its place, but why not put America’s best technical minds to work creating affordable alternatives to fossil fuels, a public health system focused on the prevention of pandemics and other major outbreaks of disease and an educational system that prepares students to be engaged citizens, not just cogs in an economic machine?

Reaching such goals would require reforming or even transforming American democracy — or what’s left of it — so that the input of the public actually made far more of a difference and leadership served the public interest, not its own economic interests. In addition, government policy would no longer be distorted to meet the emotional needs of narcissistic demagogues, or to satisfy the desires of delusional tech moguls.

By all means, let Americans unite around a common purpose. But that purpose shouldn’t be a supposedly more efficient way to build killing machines in the service of an outmoded quest for global dominance. Karp’s dream of a “technological republic” armed with his AI weaponry would be one long nightmare for the rest of us.

William D. Hurting, a TomDispatch regular, is a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. 

This article is from TomDispatch.com.

By Kit Klarenberg, The Grayzone, 3/18/25

After fervently denying that they relied on financial support from the US government, the supposedly “independent” Russian language paper Meduza has been thrown into existential crisis following the Trump administration’s pause on foreign development assistance

Alexey Kovalev, a self-described “Russian journalist currently living in exile for fear of persecution back home,” had spent much of his career at Meduza, the leading opposition media outlet in Russia. Since leaving the paper under mysterious circumstances in the summer of 2023 and relocating to London, Kovalev has split time writing commentaries for Foreign Policy and attacking reporters at The Grayzone, whom he has falsely painted as Russian assets, while calling for their imprisonment.

“The Grayzone is Russia’s US-based disinformation laundromat,” Kovalev ranted in a July 2024 blog post. “This conspiracy blog’s founders, Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal, help the Kremlin disseminate its false narratives in exchange for favors from a senior Russian government official Dmitry Polyansky, the country’s deputy ambassador to the UN. They act as unregistered foreign agents and should be investigated by the Department of Justice for possible FARA violations.”

Nearly every word Kovalev wrote was false; The Grayzone has no financial or political relationship with the Russian government, and none of its reporters have received favors from Polyansky or any other Russian official.

Now that the self-exiled troll’s former employers at Meduza have been plunged into a financial crisis by the Trump administration’s pause on foreign development assistance, Kovalev’s smears of The Grayzone have been exposed as an exceedingly embarrassing exercise in projection.

As The New York Times reported this February 26, grants from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) reportedly accounted for 15% of the outlet’s budget. So while The Grayzone accepts no foreign state support, it turns out that Meduza can not survive for a day without a constant cash infusion from its government sponsors in Washington.

Meduza’s covert US funding was revealed in a New York Times article lamenting the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts in funding for various US-financed destabilization and regime change programs across the world. According to the Times, the cuts to USAID could potentially damage Meduza’s operations more than “cyberattacks, legal threats and even poisonings of its reporters.”

The outlet went on to note that while a handful of other Western countries like Germany and Norway “contribute to independent media,” their share is “tiny in comparison with American funding.” Simultaneously, “many traditional media supporters” – including the CIA-connected Ford Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, a “giant grant maker” – have “abandoned much of [their] media funding.” A Columbia University lecturer complained the Trump administration’s aid pause was “really a blood bath.”

While a 2021 investigation by The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal revealed several grants and pledges of assistance from NATO states to Meduza, the outlet’s leadership fervently denied any suggestion of foreign sponsorship. The new revelations by the Times reveal Russia’s top opposition outlet as anything but the “independent” paper they marketed to the public.

Leaked UK files suggest Meduza’s role as NATO state-backed project

Rumors about Meduza’s Western funding have swirled since its creation in October 2014, after its founder, Galina Timchenko, was fired from one of Russia’s most popular news portals for publishing an interview with the leader of Western-backed Ukrainian fascist paramilitary group, Right Sector. That same month, Meduza cofounder Ivan Kolpakov flatly refused to reveal the outlet’s funding sources in discussions with Western media:

“I can’t tell you whether those financing the Meduza Project are Russian or foreign. There’s a huge discussion about our investors among Russian journalists, with some saying we have to tell people who they are. Yes, in a fairer world we probably should, but not in Russia in 2014. We have to protect our product and we have to protect our investors.”

A leak of sensitive British Foreign Office files obtained by The Grayzone in early 2021 contained clear indications that the outlet was funded by Western governments. The documents named Meduza as one of the “specific outlets” whose “viability… as long term partners” was being assessed as part of a broader clandestine effort by London to “weaken the Russian state’s influence.” Several veteran-run contractors charged with achieving this goal named the publication as an ideal conduit for anti-Kremlin propaganda.

Chief among these shady groups was a psyop specialist firm called the Zinc Network. In confidential submissions to the British government, Zinc noted that it was “delivering audience segmentation and targeting support” to both Meduza and MediaZona, another supposedly independent outlet launched by US-funded anti-Putin provocateurs Pussy Riot. Zinc stated, “the outlets lack the expertise and tools to understand their audience profiles or consumption habits, and to therefore promote content effectively to new audiences.”

A separate submission stated Zinc Network was “supporting Russian language media outlets across Eastern Europe by developing audience growth strategies,” under the auspices of a “pioneering media development programme for USAID,” strongly indicating its cloak-and-dagger collaboration with Meduza was financed by Washington. Elsewhere, the contractor committed to providing intensely intimate assistance to all its Russian assets, including “counselling and mental health support.” This was inspired by the politically motivated June 2019 arrest of Meduza reporter Ivan Golunov, for which law enforcement officials involved were fired.

The same document also contained a pledge to “increase search ranking and visibility” of media platforms like Meduza, by teaching them search engine optimization techniques, as well as “paid search activity for priority phrases” training in order to direct people searching for the phrase “news in Russian” away from RT. Fittingly, in a dig at the Russian state broadcaster, Meduza adopted the slogan “The Real Russia, Today,” sarcastically tweaking RT’s former name.

At the time, this journalist submitted questions to Kolpakov, as well as then-Meduza investigations editor Alexey Kovalev, about the documents suggesting NATO state support for their outlet. In one email correspondence, Kovalev alleged Meduza was financed purely by online advertising revenue from “high profile clients,” supposedly even including the Kremlin itself.

Albany expressed particular interest in Meduza’s online games, which “encourage participation through social media and mobile platforms” and “embrace political themes (e.g. “Putin Bingo,” “help Putin get to his meeting with the Pope on time” and “help the Orthodox priest get to his church without succumbing to earthly pleasures”).

The contractor hoped to assist the outlet in creating more online games, “the aim [being] to create content which is good enough to have a pull effect amongst Russian-speaking youth” in Moscow’s near abroad. Ultimately, the aim was to create “satirical games” which would demonstrate the superiority of Western European culture over Russia’s, or as (they put it) that “the offer of a fairer, respectful, and caring society is better than that of an arrogant, nationalistic regime.”

It is uncertain if this British-financed sponsorship materialized. However, these disclosures led to Meduza being labelled a “foreign agent” by Russian authorities. The outlet complained that on top of being compelled to report all the website’s income and expenses to Moscow’s Justice Ministry, the classification also had the potential to damage Meduza’s advertising revenue. The label was slammed as a gross attack on independent media by Western press rights groups, and the European Union.

These days, Meduza apparently needs all the overseas financial help it can get. As the NY Times noted, Meduza was just one “of hundreds of newsrooms in dozens of countries” collectively raking in $180 million annually in funding from USAID, the State Department, and the National Endowment for Democracy to “support journalism and media development.”

“Kill all the bad people”: diaries of a madman

With its financial pipeline to Washington severed by the Trump administration, mass layoffs at Meduza seem inevitable. Meanwhile, after spending months falsely accusing Grayzone reporters of serving as Russian assets, the former Meduza reporter Kovalev has gradually descended into a state of apparent madness.

In a widely ridiculed Telegram post on February 13, 2025, Kovalev declared that one of his goals for 2025 was to “kill all the bad people… and oppress our enemies,” declaring, “I will need the help of the community.”

The “bad people,” he explained, were not just the Russian nationalists who follow Putin, but those among his liberal opponents who had grown weary of the Ukraine proxy war, and begun calling for a settlement to end the killing. “These are worse than the [Russian nationalists]… But it is good that it is becoming crystal clear. All the whores felt they could no longer hide, and are exposing themselves. But we will not forget and will not forgive. Stay tuned.”

Weeks later, as the lights flickered off at Meduza, Kovalev locked his Twitter/X account and continued his increasingly ravings within the confines of his digital “community.” Foreign Policy has not yet responded to a request for comment on its contributor’s call to “kill all the bad people.”