Russia continued a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting the USAID and its funding (that’s currently frozen due to Trump’s order). This time, they posted a fake about “the Ukrainian Center for Psychological and Information War received [from USAID] funds amounting to $140 million monthly.” Our fact-checking department debunked this news.
What happened?
On Feb 12, the Telegram channel Медведь (“Bear,” archive), which regularly spreads Russian disinformation, published a post from American Fox News publication, “Psychological and Information Warfare Center of Ukraine [PIWCU] received $140,000,000 per month from USAID.”
“Ukrainian PIWCU received $140 million from USAID per month for fakes, farm bots, and artificial boosts for the views numbers. Powerful! And now, as I understand, the PIWCU is altogether closed. No money, but keep on holding on,” Telegram channel authors say.
The news was shared by the pro-Russian Telegram channels, such as Донецкая Губерния(Donetsk gubernia, archive), Первый Харьковский, (First Kharkovskyi, archive), Diana Panchenko+ (Диана Панченко+, archive). The news was also spread on X (1, 2, 3, 4).
Analysis
As evidence, Telegram authors added what seems to be an article by Fox News: its author is Aubrie Spady, and the date of the article’s publication is Feb 10, 2025.
We’ve checked the official website of Fox News and figured out that the article is absent from the list of Aubrie Spady’s publications.
On Feb 10, the author didn’t publish anything mentioning the Ukrainian psychological and information operation center. On this day, she published two articles about the current activities of the DOGE, led by Elon Musk.
For the next step, we’ve checked the information about key financing directions that USAID covered in Ukraine in 2024. Since the official USAID website was unavailable during the writing of this text, we checked the data on the USA’s government website, on which information about all foreign aid is published.
In the report about providing financial aid for the 2024 year, as of Dec 19, 2024, it’s noted that, in the past year, Ukraine received $6.4 billion.
On Jan 29, 2025 (at this moment, USAID didn’t work), Economic Pravda, Ukrainian media, wrote that using the agency’s programs, Ukraine received $6.05 billion in 2024. The biggest amount of funds went to economic and humanitarian projects and to financing programs for encouraging democracy and protecting human rights, which is confirmed by the reports from the USA (the totals are shown per year).
In the end, we checked the information about the operations of centers of information-psychological operations in Ukraine, one of which is mentioned in the post of propagandists.
The official website of Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence notes that information-psychological operations are the area of responsibility of the Forces of Special Operations. The Forces of Special Operations are a separate type of the Armed Forces of Ukraine that includes special unit forces, resistance movement (Rukh Oporu), and information operations units. So, PIWCU in Ukraine, which does psychological and information warfare, would be part of this structure. USAID, on the other hand, only provides non-military aid.
So, there was no article with this headline published on Fox News.
Conclusion: Fake
Authors: Ilona Zholondiievska, Olha Yakovleva
Read more
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- No, “all US aid to Ukraine” isn’t paused because of Trump’s order
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