Ukrainian Media Outlets Start Asking For Donations After US Funding Is Paused

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Major Ukrainian media outlets are asking for donations following the Trump administration’s 90-day foreign aid pause since many of them are funded by the US government.

Ukrainian-Canadian professor and researcher Ivan Katchanovski noted on X that the Ukrainian online newspaper Strana.ua reported that two outlets — Hromadske and Bihus.Info — acknowledged in their fundraising pitches that they lost US funding.

Source: Laurent Van der Stockt for Le Monde/Getty Images

BIHUS.Info said in a Facebook post that a “large portion” of its work had been funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). “Therefore, now the role of donations from viewers is changing from an alternative source to one of the key ones. What will happen in 90 days, we do not know, but we know one thing: now is the time to find out whether our work is really needed by Ukrainian society,” the post said.

Hromadske said that some of the “projects that we implement thanks to grants are temporarily stopped. That is why we especially need the support of each and every one of you.”

Other major Ukrainian outlets, including Ukrainska Pravda and Detector Media, also began asking for donations following the pause in US foreign aid but did not explicitly name that as the reason they’re fundraising.

Katchanovski, author of the book “The Maidan Massacre in Ukraine,” said many of the US-funded media outlets whitewashed the Ukrainian far-right and smeared opponents as pro-Russia.

“Major Ukrainian media outlets financed by the US and other Western governments, such as Ukrainska Pravda & Detector Media, propagated the war to the last Ukrainian, glorified & whitewashed neo-Nazi-led Azov, the OUN, and the UPA, & smeared anyone who opposed this as Russian agents paid by Kremlin,” Katchanovski wrote on X.

The New York Times reported that several humanitarian organizations in Ukraine have had to shut down due to the Trump administration’s foreign aid pause. US officials at the US Embassy in Ukraine are asking for exemptions for humanitarian operations in the country, but so far, the only known exemptions are for military aid to Israel and Egypt under the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing program.

The vast majority of US military aid to Ukraine is provided by the Pentagon, and that does not appear to be affected by the State Department’s pause. “I am focused on military aid; it has not been stopped, thank God,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday.

Before leaving office, President Biden approved a huge amount of military aid for Ukraine, and there’s no sign those shipments have been frozen.