Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) is one of the largest foreign news services, the US’ analogue of RT (Russia Today) or CGTN (China Global Television Network). All these media are state-founded, promote the official position of their governments, and run by taxpayers’ money.
As for RT or CGTN — controlled by the Kremlin and the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party respectively — even their hosts do not proclaim themselves as the Only Real Voice of Freedom and the Last Hope of Democracy. But as for RFE/FL, its image is quite different. Established at the beginning of the Cold War — initially as a radio station — it was intended to fight against the Communistic iron curtain, to combat extremist Marxist propaganda, and to endorse the that-time American values with Freedom as their pivot.
But now, almost 70 years later, this radio beam has made a U-turn. In Russia, millions of dollars from the RFE/RL budget were spent to fund the local ultraliberal opposite figures — while the Western Mainstream Media have been pushing a bogus narrative about ‘Russia-Trump collusion’ and ‘Russia-2016 US election meddling’ for years.
Despite RFE/RL is supervised by the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a body within the American government — it is hard to find any official reports explicitly showing all the expenditures of this state-funded broadcaster. One of the rare documents is the USAGM budget inquiry[1] for the 2020 fiscal year. According to it, the total USAGM budget in 2018-19 exceeded $800 million per year, with $124 million for RFE/RL — the media network covering European countries, including Russia. In the document, the USAGM praises its projects for transparency, effectiveness, and popularity among the Russian-speaking audience.
As a Russian investigative reporter, I’ve managed to obtain the financial documents of the RFE/FL’ Moscow office dating back to the same period: from 2018 to Q1 2020. The leaked papers show the reality to be quite different: RFE/RL spent tens of millions of rubles (the Russian currency) for expenditures lying far away from a ‘transparent media’.
TAXI AND ADVERTISING
The Moscow RFE/RL office worked as a convergent media: radio, website, and internet TV combined. To bring the guests to its studio, RFE/RL hired GetTaxi (now Gett), an analogue of Uber with a filial in Russia called GetTaxiRus LLC. Averagely, the Moscow RFE/RL office spent approx. 200,000 rubles ($2800 by that-time course) for taxi service per month. At that time in Moscow, a 10-km taxi ride cost about 1,000 rubles ($15).
Totally, since January 2018 to March 2020, the Moscow RFE/RL office has spent 5,464,030 rubles (approx. $84,500) for GetTaxiRus LLC. It is impossible to define either it was used for professional or private trips.
The US State Department spokespersons along with RFE/RL hosts perpetually blame Russian media for ‘anti-American propaganda’. Among them are local digital platforms such as Vkontakte or Yandex, the analogues of Facebook and Google respectively.
From 2018 to 2020, the Moscow RFE/RL office has sent 14,304,944 rubles ($201,000) to bank accounts of minor and major Russian media in dozens of wires. This money was used to promote RFE/RL among the Russian audience by context ads, web banners, and other forms of internet advertising.
Among the receivers were Yandex (3,539,400 rubles / $50,000), Vkontakte (125,000 rubles / $1,760), and Mail.Ru, another Russian analogue of Google (1,200,000 rubles / $16,900). In 2022, all were sanctioned by the West. In other words, RFE/RL financed the same ‘Russian propaganda platforms’ it fought against.
Also, more than 1,500,000 rubles ($21,000) received SMI-2 and its puppets — the infamous Russian media analogue of the British newspaper The Sun attracting readers by ‘yellow’ clickbait content. This means, the Russian audience could see RFE/RL promo banners next to the offers to look at celebrities’ naked photos and the same vulgar stuff.
And — the last but not the least — RFE/RL has made seven wires of 1,048,037 rubles ($15,000) in total to Flavius LLC. This Russian company is a publisher of Grani.ru, the oldest and one of the most radical anti-Putin websites dating back to the year of 2000. The Grani.ru journalists call[2] themselves ‘frenzied Russophobes’ whose main goal is to ‘[promote] the dissolution of the empire, decolonization, and the freedom fight of the nations of Russia’, — an euphemistic narrative meaning the dissolution of Russia by forcing regional separatism. Can you imagine RT ordering ‘advertising’ at the website of explicit separatists in any of the US states?
Since 2014, access to Grani.ru has been blocked in Russia; this means, very few people using VPN could really watch ‘the advertising of RFE/RL’ at this website. The idea to purchase such advertising looks strange — if not to assume that it was the covert support of radical anti-Russian media.
PAYING $90,000 TO THE AGENT OF INFLUENCE
Can you imagine RT or CGTN openly paying to the US’ opposite figures and prominent academicians — and how would the American patriots react?
In 2013, Sergey Medvedev[3] , a Moscow journalist and political scientist, drew all-Russian attention by calling to ‘internationalize Arctic’ and to prohibit any economic or military activity of the Kremlin throughout this territory as Russia ostensibly had ‘failed to manage’ its Far Northern part. This caused scandal and was mentioned even in one of president Putin’s speeches that year. Also, from 2004 to 2020, Sergey Medvedev had been working at a high-ranked academic position at HSE — Higher School of Economics, a leading university in Russia and one of the main analytical centres above the Russian government. Moreover, Sergey Medvedev’s non-fiction book The Return of the Russian Leviathan hardly criticised Putin was published in 2020 in England.
Unsurprisingly, at the same time, this anti-Putin academician has been working for RFE/RL as a TV host. Sergey Medvedev’s salary exceeded 200,000 rubles ($2800) per month; totally, from 2018 to Q1 2020, he received 5,916,427 rubles ($91,000). Thereby, were Sergey Medvedev’s anti-Putin and pro-US views the real reflection of the famous scientist’s independent position, or were they prompted by rich honorariums from American people’s money?
Another RFE/RL employee was Andrey Loshak[4] . In 2013, this opposite journalist hold individual street meetings to support Pussy Riot, an anti-Christian group of left radicals that was later engaged in anti-Trump campaigns. In 2018-19, RFE/RL granted Andrey Loshak with 3,577,520 rubles ($55,200) for making anti-Putin documentary films.
The next left-liberal TV host and documentary maker was Ekaterina Ponomareva. From 2018 to Q1 2020, she received 18,028,871 rubles ($277,600) from RFE/RL. Ponomareva’s documentaries were devoted[5] to gay and transgender persons in Russia — the same time President Trump banned the transgender agenda in the US army.
Her colleague, Vadim Kondakov[6] , received 19,998,620 rubles ($310,000) during the same period. It is only a little part of the financial files; all in all, RFE/RL was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for propaganda documentaries in Russia. Even if we assume that some of these money were not personal honorariums of the film-makers but were spent to produce the films, it is unable to control whether this or that documentary really cost its price.
If all these digits seem not so high for a Western reader, please note that in Russia, the GDP per capita is twice less than in the US, as well as salaries and expenditures, while the number of homeless veterans in Russia is much less than in the US.
And another droll. The US’ principled position is that it never accepts the 2014 reunification of the Crimean peninsula with Russia. Nevertheless, RFE/RL, apparently, stands on another line. The financial documents of the Moscow RFE/RL office contain about hundred of money wires to dozen Crimean journalists collaborated with this American broadcaster. The money was sent to their bank accounts at RNKB, the largest Crimean bank[7] which is controlled by the Russian government. Thereby, the US’ state media has de facto recognized the Russian jurisdiction of the peninsula and the authenticity of the Russian enterprises operating there.
THE DEMS’ CORNER
Totally, according to the leaked files, from 2018 to Q2 2020, the US government spent about $16,368,000 to the RFE/RL Moscow office (this sum does not include the expenditures on the RFE/RL main office in Prague which also hires Russian-speaking staffers and produces content in the Russian language). In the files, I found zero wires to the Moscow RFE/RL bank account rather than from its maternal headquarter. Most media earn money from advertising or public fundraising, as part of the market economy; but this media — as if it was time of socialism and planned economy — did not gain any other money than the American taxpayers’.
Despite its claimed dedication to independent journalism, the Russian RFE/RL service enthusiastically supported the bogus narrative of ‘Trump-Russia collusion’. I would cite just one of its articles[8] as of 2016, titled Russia’s trace in Trump’s victory, implicitly supported the same fake version even in the caption — as well as lots of other Radio Liberty articles.
Perhaps the reason was the affiliation of the RFE/RL authorities with the Democratic Party. Amanda Bennett, the then-CEO of the USAGM, resigned in 2020 amid conflict with Trump who sought to cut the financing of the American foreign broadcasting due to its unconscionable cost as I’ve revealed in this text. Nevertheless, the next president Joe Biden returned Amanda Bennett to the same post in 2021.
In the above-mentioned budget inquiry, the USAGM alleged its competitors — Russia’s RT and China’s CCTV — for ‘inundating audience with disinformation about global events and depicting the United States on an irreversible downward spiral.’ Nevertheless, doesn’t it make the same? Andrei Babitsky[9] , one of the most famous anti-Kremlin journalists of modern Russia, was fired from RFE/RL after his attempt[10] to expose the slaughtering of innocent Donbass civilians committed by the Ukrainian neo-Nazi in 2014.
Edvard Chesnokov (1987) is a Moscow-based journalist objected at foreign policy and anti-Soros investigations, contributed to Komsomolskaya Pravda (Russia), Harici (Turkey), PuntAvui (Spain), The Gateway Pundit (US), and other international media.
According to its own Wiki page
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Грани.ру
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Грани.ру#Приостановка_работы
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Медведев,_Сергей_Александрович_(политолог)
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Лошак,_Андрей_Борисович
https://spisok-inoagentov.ru/ekaterina-ponomareva/
https://spisok-inoagentov.ru/vadim-kondakov/
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Российский_национальный_коммерческий_банк
https://www.svoboda.org/amp/28108501.html
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Бабицкий,_Андрей_Маратович
https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/1829143
Edvard Chesnokov
Edvard Chesnokov (1987) is a Moscow-based journalist objected at foreign policy and anti-Soros
investigations, contributed to Komsomolskaya Pravda (Russia), Harici (Turkey), PuntAvui (Spain),
The Gateway Pundit (US), and other international media.
