“Radio Liberty": hypocrisy as a standard A reckoning with US propaganda

On April 1, the American "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty," along with all of its affiliates, will cease its operations aimed at a number of countries—from Azerbaijan to Hungary, from China to Belarus. The decision of U.S. President Donald Trump to shut down this radio and similar projects is portrayed by his opponents as some sort of madness. Some say that the American leader is abandoning support for the idealistic bastion of "truth." Others claim he is destroying an effective political tool that has served the collective West for decades.

However, Trump's motives are quite clear. The effectiveness of the U.S.-created radio stations has always been questionable, and now they have turned into a weapon for Trump's opponents. Moreover, like USAID, they have caused problems in U.S. relations with the relevant countries—just recall the scandals related to "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty" in Azerbaijani-American relations. For the world as a whole, they were not a source of quality journalism, but rather a standard of hypocrisy.

"Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty" and the Liberal Revenge

First and foremost, Trump is shutting down "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty" (RFE/RL), as well as "Voice of America" and other related projects, because they have become bastions of his political opponents. Until the Obama presidency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which manages these projects, was overseen by a board of directors that represented both American political parties. When Obama, a representative of the Democratic Party, left office, he restructured the management system of the Agency and placed everything in the hands of a member of his party, leaving Trump at a disadvantage. Trump tried to fix the situation by appointing his own person during his first term in office, but by the end of the 2010s, the Democratic Party's agenda, along with that of its European liberal allies, had come to dominate RFE/RL. As Kari Lake, appointed by Trump to restore order at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, recently stated, “It is unfortunate that the work that was done by self-interested insiders in coordination with outside activist groups and radical Leftist advocacy organizations to ‘Trump-Proof’ the agency made it impossible to reform.”

Keeping RFE/RL afloat meant feeding a machine that was secretly working against Trump in violation of its mandate. Playing with things like liberal control of government structures is too costly for Trump's team, as the Democratic Party and its allies are feverishly preparing for a comeback. The extent to which RFE/RL is controlled by them can be seen in the fact that when European liberal elites encountered problems with Bulgaria and Romania, RFE/RL reopened its offices there in 2019. And when Brussels clashed with the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán, RFE/RL restored its long-closed Hungarian section in 2020.

But perhaps, despite its involvement in internal American squabbles, RFE/RL had some effective core capable of defending the interests of the U.S. and its allies. As European liberal elites lament, Trump abandoned a powerful tool and, moreover, deprived millions of people around the world of "truth." However, despite burning through enormous sums of money—over $800 million per year in recent years, with plans to spend $950 million this year—RFE/RL, not to mention "Voice of America," had very little influence when it came to driving constructive change. People long stopped listening to the radio outside of FM range, and RFE/RL's attempts to move to the internet were largely unsuccessful. Even countries with minimal technical capabilities can block these centralized internet propaganda flows, unlike medium- and long-wave radio, which even the USSR could only partially jam! Moreover, the role of RFE/RL and its clones during the Cold War has been greatly exaggerated and is based on unfounded claims. Often, these structures broadcast "into space"—there's a known story of how they spent years broadcasting propaganda to the western regions of communist China before realizing that the local population technically couldn’t hear them at all.

In the new technological landscape, RFE/RL couldn’t compete even in terms of content. Despite burning through enormous sums, it produced very little of substance. Through manipulation and exaggeration, these flaws could be hidden for a while, but they occasionally came to light—even before Trump and Musk's audit of U.S. government institutions began. For example, last year it was revealed that, after spending nearly two million dollars from the U.S. federal budget, RFE/RL created the video project Votvot, which had only 2,000 subscribers on YouTube and an overall audience of fewer than 20,000 people. The project, dedicated to Russian opposition culture, had its website blocked in Russia, but that doesn’t explain its failure—project content was easily accessible in Russia through platforms like YouTube or Telegram. In the second year of its implementation, the project’s budget was cut, but it still amounted to a substantial sum, over one million dollars—more than three times the funding for RFE/RL's main "Russian" project, the internet television channel "Current Time."

The failure was hidden not only through silence but also through manipulation. During the second year of operation, the number of subscribers to the Votvot YouTube channel skyrocketed to 132,000, but it’s hard to believe that these are not "dead souls." The issue is that, despite this growth, the corresponding Telegram channel currently has only 1,610 subscribers! To reiterate, this concerns the leading project of RFE/RL in the strategically most important direction, which is closely monitored.

In less important areas for Washington, the situation for RFE/RL was much worse—details will likely emerge after the restructuring of government agencies by the new team in Washington. Recently, Kari Lake already spoke about the hundreds of millions of dollars that the U.S. Agency for Global Media (which also oversaw RFE/RL) “being spent on fake news companies”. Now it should be clear where the outrageous nonsense came from that liberal mouthpieces have been peddling all these years, such as the "Syrian mercenaries on Azerbaijan’s payroll."

"Black Hole" for Journalists

The failures were inevitable. What struck me about RFE/RL for a long time was the lack of professionalism in its post-Soviet editorial offices. They had serious funding, informal immunity (in Belarus, until the very end of the 2010s, RFE/RL staff rarely faced the issues that their colleagues from other opposition media outlets did, even managing to extract information from government bodies), and they promised their employees immense perks: the prospect of fantastic earnings upon relocating to the Prague headquarters, American health insurance, and a green card, thereby successfully luring talented colleagues from state and other media. But then, with few exceptions, these colleagues stopped being creative and mostly churned out intense propaganda. Those who tried to produce more balanced content found themselves removed from RFE/RL.

An example of this can be seen in the case of RFE/RL correspondent Andrei Babitsky. In the 1990s and 2000s, he built a reputation as a scandalous critic of the Russian government, particularly known for his reports with Chechen field commanders. For this, while working for RFE/RL, he was even held in a secret dungeon by Russian military forces in Chechnya. Despite these accomplishments, he was kicked off American radio as soon as, in 2014, he reported on the crimes of Ukrainian ultra-right volunteer battalions. It’s unlikely he supported pro-Russian separatists; rather, he instinctively felt that it was important to tell this story, if only to have an audience on both sides of the front, rather than just a niche audience of aging perestroika intellectuals. Babitsky also understood that no one helped create the conditions for Russia's intervention in Ukraine more than these militarily pointless "volunteer battalions," which, like in other such conflicts, could never replace regular armies, intelligence, or police forces. But they terrorized the civilian population and undermined the foundations of the Ukrainian state as effectively as separatists and saboteurs.

However, blind adherence to American political policy, rather than even a minimally critical approach, could still be understood. Yet, there were practices at RFE/RL that had nothing to do with U.S. politics and even hindered its implementation. When I was once invited to work at this institution, I couldn’t last even a month, after my previous experience in German media, where the rules and decisions were transparent, and opinions were pluralistic. At RFE/RL, I felt like I had landed in a semi-mafia-like structure where there were only the patron’s views and instructions from the Prague headquarters, and the work was focused not on covering events but on finding negativity to spread without getting to the bottom of the matter. At first, I thought this was just the problem of one or two small RFE/RL editorial offices, until a huge scandal broke out in the early 2010s in the major Russian service of RFE/RL. The new editor-in-chief, Masha Gessen, appointed there, arbitrarily fired many employees, even those who had worked there for years, building a structure that was absolutely loyal to herself. As a result, veterans of American agitprop complained about her to Washington as someone who had "destroyed the Moscow service," but to no avail—feudal practices prevailed at RFE/RL, and Gessen followed the line of the ruling Democratic Party. She was also a prominent activist for LGBTQ+ rights.

Veterans of Nazi genocides and the Soviet Party nomenklatura

This chronic crisis situation is primarily due to political dogmatism. Put simply, the goal of RFE/RL was not to support "independent journalism" or to seek truthful information, nor was it to find paths of mutual understanding between the U.S. and the countries it broadcasted to. The mission was about a "crusade" against one opponent or another, a "liberal jihad" that could be launched at any time against any state or adversary, requiring readiness to pivot 180 or even 360 degrees. It is not surprising that, given this objective, the selection of personnel at RFE/RL was characterized by boundless cynicism, which was disguised as pragmatism. As a result, until the 1990s, it was hard to find leaders or key staff in RFE/RL’s language sections who were not involved in Nazi crimes. It wasn’t until Israel gained more influence in the U.S. by the 1980s and began addressing these issues that involvement in the Holocaust became an ordinary point in the biographies of the station's staff.

For decades, RFE/RL called on the countries it broadcasted to "repent" for various episodes in their recent history, yet it never repented for the Nazi chapters in the biographies of its "legendary" staff members. As former Nazi collaborators aged, RFE/RL continued its practice of cooperating with politically questionable figures, but now in a different direction. In the late 1980s, when the U.S. authorities decided to expand broadcasting to the Soviet republics, former Nazi collaborators already working at RFE/RL turned to seasoned elements within the party newspapers and even the Communist Party apparatus. Some of these individuals, after the dissolution of the USSR, went on to have successful careers at RFE/RL — such as Alexander Lukashuk, who, after leading the Belarusian service, was appointed to develop the crucial Afghan service for the U.S. and gained considerable influence in RFE/RL's leadership. During Soviet times, he had first served in key positions at a republican party newspaper and then became the director of a republican state publishing house — meaning that for several years, he was part of the infamous nomenclature of the Central Committee. Naturally, he now dislikes mentioning this and hints that he was always against it, but remained in his position until the very end, swaying with the party line. As a result, Lukashuk's former colleagues, seasoned in Soviet party propaganda, took key positions in the Belarusian service at RFE/RL.

This influence was evident at RFE/RL, where Lukashuk became despised by half the corporation: having gained influence over the radio’s leadership, he began promoting methods and approaches akin to those of the late Soviet ideological department of the Central Committee. Of course, this had nothing to do with Marxism — he was probably never a Marxist, although understanding the true beliefs of such individuals is nearly impossible. But when the Trump team speaks of the infiltration of RFE/RL by hostile elements, the staff selection at RFE/RL was indeed pathological. It’s not that a person cannot change their political affiliations — the problem lies in the fact that such radical shifts should be accompanied by, if not explanations, at least an acknowledgment of their past.

However, "infiltration" is probably not the best term to describe this process. RFE/RL was directly funded by the CIA from its inception until 1971, after which the structure was reformed, but the connections were not severed. So, the problems were created by the American intelligence agencies themselves, whose work Trump also intends to address.

In other words, the problems are not only with RFE/RL but with everyone connected to it in the American system. As a result, the "freedom fighters" have little hope for the foreseeable future. Many of them are pinning their hopes on the European Union, which could take on the funding of RFE/RL. However, pushing such a decision through the EU will be difficult, not just because of the money. Hungary, which RFE/RL has been targeting for years, will oppose it. EU officials are also clearly wary of entering into a sharp confrontation with Trump, who is unlikely to approve of such a move. Furthermore, RFE/RL directly competes with several existing European projects — from the Eurovision Song Contest and national media corporations like "Deutsche Welle" or "France 24" to smaller media projects that the EU funds to change governments in various countries. In this situation, no matter how many crocodile tears the EU sheds, they will not rush to support RFE/RL. This became clear recently when EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas gave an evasive answer to a related question, despite her apparent personal desire to find funding for RFE/RL: "The answer to this question is not automatic, because many organizations come to us with the same problem."

Thus, by dismantling RFE/RL and its associated projects, Trump is rejecting an instrument that, from the perspective of American interests, proved to be inefficient. Due to its ideological nature and subordination to a particular political force within the U.S., it created problems in Washington's relations with other countries. For him, this is not only a matter of saving funds but also of political struggle.

Has the world lost something important with the departure of RFE/RL? In many countries, local media will report on the situation more adequately and constructively, rather than media projects mimicking them with overseas funding and foreign agendas. The issue is not so much with the funding or subordination but with the desire to hide it. RFE/RL’s language sections fanatically insist that they are “independent media” of the respective countries, and their staff are unwilling to acknowledge the conflict of interest. In this regard, the dismantling of RFE/RL and associated organizations under the U.S. Agency for Global Media has propagated hypocrisy and political cynicism on a global scale, presenting themselves as paragons of free speech while not hesitating to spread blatant misinformation. Today, liberal media criticize Trump's cynicism, but compared to RFE/RL at any point in its history, Trump's team almost looks like idealists.