Propaganda in Modern Warfare

The war in Ukraine did not begin in 2022. It began in 2014 when the United States orchestrated a coup in Kyiv, replacing an elected government with a Western puppet regime. This was not an accident of history but the result of years of intervention, billions of dollars funnelled into “pro-democracy” organizations (USAID, NED, and NGOs), the deliberate cultivation of nationalist forces willing to serve NATO’s agenda, and narrative-enforcement mechanisms.

Ukraine was not just another domino in Washington’s regime-change playbook. It was the frontline in a long-planned war against Russia, a war that, as with Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, would be waged not with American blood but with the bodies of those caught in the crossfire. What followed in Ukraine was not democracy but war: the banning of opposition parties, the targeting of Russian-speaking populations in the Donbas, and the slow march to an inevitable conflict—one that NATO had been preparing for long before Russia’s invasion in 2022.

When Moscow finally responded in 2022, the media flipped the script: the years of NATO expansion, the broken promises, and the U.S. role in the coup were erased. In their place, a new Cold War narrative emerged: Russia as the aggressor, Ukraine as the heroic defender of democracy, and the West as the noble saviour. It was the same blueprint used in Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe—destabilization, a pro-Western puppet regime, and the expansion of U.S. military and corporate interests.

But who benefits? Certainly not the Ukrainian people, whose country has been turned into a proxy battlefield. Not the European economies, strangled by sanctions designed in Washington. The real winners are the arms dealers, the energy giants, and the politicians who thrive on war.

The story surrounding USAID is unfolding daily, with new revelations about funding, corruption, and the broader implications of its operations aimed at controlling nations that might stand on their own feet, define their own destiny, and reject the U.S.-led order.

USAID functioned as a kind of next-step agency—operating outside formal government structures, resisting oversight, and even avoiding congressional scrutiny. It could act within the U.S. itself, influencing politics in ways that were barely accountable to the president. Over the last few years, it has played a major role in shaping U.S. and international affairs.

Wikileaks revealed that USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 “media” NGOs, including nine out of ten media outlets in Ukraine. USAID controlled also a lot of Russian media, like the Russian media outlet Meduza,the U.S. Government’s anti-Russia mouthpiece, designed to destabilize Russia and push NATO’s narratives.

With Trump scaling down USAID drastically—from 15,000 employees to about 270—and folding it under the State Department, while this sounds like the end of its operations, rebranding doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the underlying mechanisms. But the decision that Trump made damages not just the U.S. but its allies as well. The EU, which has often been complicit in these efforts, is also affected.

These revelations expose the entire Western regime change playbook, making it much harder for them to operate under the guise of supporting democracy. Ultimately, all of this has driven a wedge through international law. The sheer scale of interference in sovereign nations goes against the entire doctrine of the UN Charter. Now that the world knows the extent of these operations, the U.S. and its allies will find it much harder to justify their actions moving forward.

Yet, the deep state still exists, and regime change efforts might continue under a different name. The real question is: does this fundamentally alter the U.S.’s ability to manufacture narratives and control global information flows?