I’m sure you’ve all seen the Kyiv Independent online during all this. They’ve been one of the most prolific propaganda arms of the Ukranian state, with over a million followers and a seemingly endless stream of (almost always unconfirmed and unconfirmable) posts.

I was doing a little legwork on one of their more odious propagandists, the admitted Azov member Illia Ponomarenko (https://twitter.com/IAPonomarenko) and I seem to have stumbled on a NATO propaganda op.

I’ll get back to Illia in a moment, but for now we must turn an eye to the paper he works for, the Kyiv Independent. While ostensibly it seems to be a normal paper, when you start to look at the “journalists” they employ, a certain pattern emerges.

https://kyivindependent.com/team/

Let’s start from the top.

Olga Rudenko, Editor-in-Chief:

According to her Linkedin she worked for three years with something called “Objective Investigative Reporting Project” as a grant coordinator for “independent Journalists”

A little digging around finds that she is referring to this, of which no next step is necessary given as the sidebar says it all

Launched in July 2013, Objective is a new media development project and joint venture of Niras/BBC funded by the Danish Foreign Ministry. The project will run for four years in seven countries - Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

She would then go on to work for a mysterious freelancing agency (I can find nothing about their funding or ownership, and their office appears to be a small rented space in Deleware) for a while before ending up at the Kyiv post, then the Kyiv independent.

Jakub Parusinski, CFO

Managed a London office for McKinsey, I really don’t even know how much we need to say.

However, if we need to go deeper, we find that prior to that he worked for the International Center for Policy Studies a think tank founded by the Open Society Institute, and funded by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which was founded by the German government and is currently funded by USAID more than any other donor (view page 20)

Daryna Shevchenko, CEO

Her background starts off hot working for a company called IREX, who, according to it’s financial disclosure forms says the following

IREX receives funds from the U.S. Department of State (DOS), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), other Federal agencies, and private-sector sources. Approximately 86 percent and 90 percent of the funds received in 2020 and 2019 including cost share, respectively, were through awards from the U.S. government.

But it gets better! After that, she founded a company called the Media Development Foundation, which works with both the National Endowment for Democracy and the US Embassy in Kiev before getting together with Jakub to found jnomics media, then the Kyiv Independent.

Oleksiy Sorokin, COO and Political Editor

Started out with Transparency International which, according to it’s own disclosures is funded by the US Department of State, UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and the Foreign offices of many other NATO/US aligned states.

He then went straight from that into a COO and editor job after only 3 years experience, something which would be odd indeed was this a real journalism outfit.

Illia Ponomarenko, Defense “Reporter” and Azov Member

Now we’re back to this punk.

A man who attended a strange university, Mariupol State Humanitarian University, founded in only 1991 seemingly by Greek immigrants and ALSO funded by USAID (scroll down to the bottom it’s on the front page), who’s 36 year old rector, Mykola Trofymenko (appointed at 34) has the same profile as a ghost despite his meteoric rise to the head of a University.

From there, he went straight into working as a “defense reporter” and befriending Nazi militia commanders and becoming one of the most odious propagandists in this war.

It didn’t take me long to find all of this. A little more digging and we could get even more, I think. Even with this, the line between US/NATO governments, regime change ops and intelligence and the Kyiv independent is clear and direct. from pronhaul2012 on Reddit