Investigate State Department Role in Assembling Ukrainian Hit List

July 29, 2022 (EIRNS)—Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation (CCD) published a new report on July 14, fingering 78 international “speakers” as purveyors of alleged “Russian propaganda.” The first 30 names on the list, including Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, all had one thing in common: Each had spoken before at least one Schiller Institute international conference this year.

A number of the 78 named by the CCD, which operates under the Ukrainian presidency’s National Security and Defense Council, warned after learning of its existence that this was a hit list, and a threat to their personal security.

Andriy Shapovalov, acting head of the CCD, has made that threat explicit. In an address to an international roundtable on countering disinformation on July 14, the very day the CCD list was released, Shapovalov charged that people who deliberately spread disinformation are “information terrorists,” subject to be tried as “war criminals.”

As reported on the CCD’s “Events” page: Shapovalov emphasized to the (unnamed) participating “representatives of state authorities, public organizations, mass media and international experts,” that “ ‘people who deliberately spread disinformation are information terrorists.’ He noted that in order to protect the information space, it is necessary to make changes to the legislation. ‘Information terrorists should know that they will have to answer to the law as war criminals,’ he emphasized.”

The U.S. State Department played a key role in organizing and funding the roundtable to which Shapovalov delivered this chilling threat, on the very day his center published its hit list. As the following initial investigation shows, the State Department knew or should have known of the threats issued. The question arises: Were any State Department officials involved in drawing up the hit list and encouraging its publication?

According to the CCD, the conference was “supported” (in Ukrainian)—that is, funded—by the State Department, and the U.S.-headquartered Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF Global Ukraine) was responsible for organizing the event, along with several Ukrainian outfits.

Funders of the CRDF Global Ukraine, a public-private organization “founded in 1995 in response to the collapse of the Soviet Union,” include the State Department, State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Defense Department, and DOD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the “U.K. government,” and the U.K. government’s Counter Proliferation & Arms Control Centre. Led and staffed primarily by people with long careers with the U.S. “MICIMATT” (Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex), “Countering Disinformation and Cyber Security” is one of the CRDF’s “strategic areas,” along with nuclear proliferation and bioweapons lab operations, and a few other areas. The CRDF’s Eastern Europe & Eurasia Hub has operated out of Kiev since 1997.

In April 2022, U.S. Department of State Senior Assistance Coordinator for Ukrainian Affairs David Shlaefer played a leading role in a “national cybersecurity cluster” held by the National Cybersecurity Coordinating Center of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, with support from CRDF Global and the U.S. State Department Office of the Coordinator for Assistance to Europe and Eurasia, according to the CRDF.

It is clear that, should anything happen to any of the 78 people included on the Ukrainian hit list, the U.S. State Department could be held co-responsible for that harm.