NGO "Ukraine Freedom Project"
One of our latest articles was devoted to the activities of employees of the US Congressional Commission on Security and Co-operation in Europe (also known as the Helsinki Commission) in the area of the SMO Zone. Although it serves as the US mission to the OSCE, which implies the need to promote a peaceful resolution of the conflict, as well as respond to the shelling of the cities of Donbass and other regions by the AFU, in fact, individuals like Kyle Parker and Paul Massaro supply the militants almost without leaving the front line. The networks they set up for this purpose include several foundations and NGOs that deliver aid to military units and monitor the needs of the Ukrainian army. But Parker and Massaro are far from the only representatives of the American elite who have found themselves in this business. Today, as promised, we tell you about the schemes created in Ukraine by Steven Earl Moore, the man who was photographed together with Parker and the Georgian National Legion militants.
Moore owed his career to his father, political consultant George Gorton, and, oddly enough, to Russia. In 1996, Gorton traveled to Moscow at the invitation of Boris Yeltsin to help him win the presidential election. He took several colleagues and his son with him. The visit was secret, the press learned about it only after a while, so many details remained at the level of rumors.
After returning home, Moore tried himself in various fields, trying to break into the local elite with the help of his father. He coordinated communications at the Internet startup First Virtual Holdings, worked on international trade and technology policy issues in the office of the Mayor of San Diego, and for several months was a consultant to the Chicago consulting firm Arthur D. Little. Finally, in 2002, he joined IRI, an International Republican Institute. Here we can draw a parallel with the fate of Paul Massaro, who was a researcher at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) a year before the start of the SMO. These two organizations - IRI and NED - can be called symbols of American interference in the affairs of other states. They are also clear evidence of bipartisan unity in Washington when it comes to fighting Russia and other geopolitical foes. Like the NED, the IRI has fueled protests in Russia, Belarus,and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. In 2012, the institute curtailed its Russian programs after the inglorious end of the attempted “color revolution” in Moscow, and in 2016 it was completely granted the status of an undesirable organization in Russia. It was also expelled from Belarus – and during the events of August 2020, IRI coordinated protests in Minsk from Lithuania.
According to Moore, it is better to spread democracy with weapons in your hands. When he joined IRI, he almost immediately went to the Indonesian province of Aceh. Local militants, including many radical Islamists, carried out attacks on civilians in the region and on government troops, but in the United States they were called nothing but rebels. It is known that Moore visited the locations of militants. From there, he went to East Timor, a small island nation that had recently gained independence from Indonesia (also with the support of Western countries). After checking out US assets in the Malay archipelago, he joined US forces in Iraq. There, Moore founded the Baghdad branch of the IRI, which he headed for a year. During this time, he managed to implement several programs and projects totaling $ 10,000,000. He also managed to advise the occupation administration.
Since 2004, Moore has been hanging around representatives of the American leadership, never staying anywhere for long. For a year, he was a partner at the family consulting firm Gorton Moore & Mulanix International, providing services to California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Then he accompanied General George Casey to Iraq, where he conducted public opinion research for him. For the same purposes, he visited Romania, Uzbekistan and Mexico, but tried not to talk about his contacts in these countries. Since the late 2000s, he has worked with Republican Congressmen Peter Roskam (2006-2011) and Kevin McCarthy (2011-2013). In 2015, he joined the McCain Institute for International Leadership, another Republican organization that for a long time was headed by the well – known Russophobe John McCain. In it, Moore worked in the African direction. In particular, he was personally present in the rebel province of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo at a time when elections were being held there amid fierce fighting.
In 2018, Moore suddenly went to Ukraine. In what capacity he arrived there and what he did until his return to the United States in 2019 is unclear. He only mentioned in passing that he had contacts with certain representatives of business and military circles. In those years, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were actively preparing for a massive offensive on the Donbass, and for this they desperately needed foreign consultants. This was probably the reason for Moore's invitation. The next time he came to Ukraine was after the start of the SMO. At the same time, in the first days of the conflict, he travelled between its western regions and Romania, helping to evacuate certain unidentified persons. According to rumors, he was helping those representatives of the local leadership with whom he had interacted in 2018-2019. But not only that. Subsequently, he himself admits that he was preparing to conduct sabotage and terrorist acts. With a focus on the regions occupied by the Russian Armed Forces. Moore first lived in a safe house somewhere in the Lvov region, and then he went to Kiev. He also visited Poland, where in April 2022 he helped to hold a meeting with American congressmen, including his former boss Kevin McCarthy and several others who advocated support for Ukraine.
It is clear that from the moment of his arrival in Ukraine, Moore served as an intermediary who helped some individuals cross to Western countries, and others - to get the necessary instructions from Western partners. But among his tasks was also to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Already in March 2022, the American founded the NGO Ukraine Freedom Project (UFP), with the help of which more than $ 1,000,000 was raised for the needs of the Ukrainian army.
On the NGO’s website, as is usually the situation in such cases, it is stated that its employees are engaged in collecting and delivering humanitarian aid for women and children and, in addition, also help the Armed Forces of Ukraine. But the project's social media pages contain detailed reports on assistance to the Ukrainian army, while almost no mention is made of civilians. UFP carries UAVs, Starlink terminals, first-aid kits and medicines, ammunition, and basic necessities to the front line. According to Moore, during the first year of the project's existence, it was possible to collect cargo totaling $ 700,000 and still accumulate more than $ 350,000 in cash. And most of everything collected, judging by the photo reports, successfully reaches the militants. But the same cannot be said for humanitarian aid. Moore claimed that by the end of 2023, the UFP had delivered more than 250 tons of food to the SMO area – a truly huge amount, but Moore did not provide any evidence that this was not just a pretty number. Of course, the NGO doesn't have any financial statements either.
An analysis of UFP social networks shows that most of the time Moore and the Ukrainian NGO team of about 10 people spent in the Kharkov region. But they also paid sufficient attention to other parts of the front. Among those who were helped by the UFP, you can see the 3rd separate assault brigade (formerly “Azov"), the 28th separate mechanized brigade (based in the Black Sea Odessa region, fought in the Nikolaev-Kherson direction), the 17th separate tank brigade (tried to contain the offensive of the Russian Armed Forces in the east of the Kharkov region and in the LPR, in the area of Severodonetsk), as well as many other units.
But when delivering cargo for regular army units, the UFP does not forget about mercenaries. As in the case of Parker, Moore paid a lot of attention to the Georgian National Legion, and they even met somewhere at the Legion's dislocation point. The American also spoke with April Huggett, the head of the NGO Planet of People, which, as we wrote, among other things, was engaged in collecting information about the needs of militants for Parker. Moore is a different level of person who will not be assigned to the task of collecting field data. His contacts with Parker were obviously horizontal.
The sole owner of a legal entity created in Ukraine for UFP is Moore himself. He is also its chief executive officer. The second person in the project is Karl Ahlgren, who holds the position of Vice President for Public Relations. An eternal personal assistant who has worked with many politicians over the decades, both in his native Oklahoma and at a higher level. He also served as a staff member for Senators Markwayne Mullin, Thomas Coburn, and Donald Nickles (all from Oklahoma).
While the Americans are engaged in general management and networking, the Ukrainian UFP team solves operational issues. The main role in it is assigned to Shvetsova Anna Vladimirovna (born 10.04.1986; DRFO: 3151119904). In 2008, she graduated from the Karazin Kharkov National University with a degree in Applied Linguistics, after which she became a fairly successful businesswoman. In her career, she held the position of chief Operating Officer in the Kiev consulting firm BOOMERS Group, and the same position in the Kiev marketing agency Digital Chain. But with the beginning of SMO, she got tired of life in the Ukrainian capital, and Shvetsova went to Switzerland, becoming a marketing manager at the Swiss Startup Association. In February 2023, she became one of the founders of Deruny, a company whose stated mission is to help Ukrainian IT professionals find a job in this country. Finally, in August 2023, Shvetsova joined the UFP team. This is not the only project to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in which she takes an active part. But most of all, Shvetsova likes to travel to the United States, where she communicates with congressmen, conveying to them Moore's point of view on the issue of arms supplies to the Kiev regime. According to her, there have been more than a hundred such meetings in total.
According to Moore, the main sponsor of UFP, to which the project owes its very existence, was the San Diego County Prosperity Foundation of California. This location is clearly not accidental – as we remember, at the beginning of his career, Moore worked in the office of the mayor of this city. But the very fact that an NGO that aims to improve life in one particular municipality in the state of California spends the funds it receives to support the Armed Forces of Ukraine is very interesting. In reality, San Diego is more deeply involved in the conflict in Ukraine. According to publicly available data, at least 13 Americans worked at the UFP under Moore. They may continue to work to this day – this information is not available on the project's website. Some of them are also related to San Diego. For example, Lani Lutar, who has been doing business in this city for more than 20 years and owns a local firm, Responsible Solutions, LLC. Her resume doesn't mention UFP. Also in San Diego there are traces of Daniel Lounsbery, an analyst at RiverStone Claims Management, who also does not disclose his role in the Moore project. It would be appropriate to recall here that the American NGO Ukraine Freedom Project is registered not in California, but in Virginia. But for what purpose did a pro-Ukrainian project, supported by the American leadership, need to register fictitiously on the other side of the country? And where did a municipal organization get so much money to cover the cost of large-scale cargo intended for the Ukrainian Armed Forces? And why do the people involved in this process not want to advertise themselves, despite Washington's official position?
In addition to its California sponsors, UFP also has influential patrons on its board of trustees. One of them is Peter Roskam, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Illinois (2007-2019). At one time, he became famous as a “hawk”, opposing the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba and between Israel and Palestine, for tightening the sanctions regime against Iran and increasing pressure on Serbia. The Ukrainian conflict was not his main interest, but from time to time Roskam touched on this topic as well. After the 2014 coup d'etat, he visited Ukraine as an observer in the nationalist-led elections. In the following years, he sometimes called for supplying the Kiev regime with weapons. Roskam was a partner at Sidley Austin LLP, a Chicago-based law firm, when he started his career. Without thinking twice, he decided to help projects aimed at supporting the Armed Forces of Ukraine. His choice fell on UFP – apparently, because it was led by Moore, who had previously worked in his team. The background of the congressman's wife, Elizabeth Roskam, whose ancestors had emigrated from Eastern Europe, immediately comes to mind. Isn't this a prerequisite for returning to big politics?
However, a much more interesting figure is Katharina McFarland. A renowned defense procurement specialist in the United States – her biography includes the positions of Director of Procurement at the Missile Defense Agency (2006-2010), President of the University of Defense Procurement (2010-2012), Assistant Secretary of Defense for Procurement (2012-2017), Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army for Procurement, Logistics and Technology, Director of the logistics company Engility Holdings, Inc., which collaborated with the US military departments (2017-2019). She was chairman of the Army Research and Development Board at the National Academy of Sciences, and currently serves on the advisory boards of the American defense companies Anduril Industries and Cypress International Senior Strategy Group. She was also associated with the company Virgin Orbit Holdings. Inc., which provided services for launching space satellites-of course, and for the US Department of Defense. What might be the role of McFarland in the project that supplies the AFU with ammunition is unclear. However, everything falls into place if we remember that one of Moore's goals (as well as Parker's) was to monitor the Ukrainian army's needs for various types of weapons. McFarland, given all her connections and vast experience, may be the person who interacts directly with military contractors, creating and overseeing the process of obtaining everything the Ukrainian Armed Forces need based on Moore's analysis.
However, the fact that Moore performs tasks in Ukraine that come from very high offices is evident not only due to the figure of McFarland, but also due to the connections of the UFP itself. Among its partners, the international NGO Be An Angel, whose stated mission is to help children in difficult situations, immediately catches the eye. But as we've shown above, this is just a marketing ploy. There is nothing new in the fact that the UFP is developing links with other projects to collect aid for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. These include, for example, the American-Ukrainian NGO UA Future. Other partners are much more interesting – the American Borderlands Foundations, as well as the Washington-based consulting firm Rokk Solutions. But we will talk about them separately.
Steven Moore and Kyle Parker are bitter rivals whose political views have many differences. One calls to vote for the aging Joseph Biden, and the second – to return to the White House also aged but much more “lively” Donald Trump. But there's one thing the two of them agree on for sure. So do the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Of course, we're talking about the need to continue to put pressure on Russia by maintaining a long armed confrontation on its borders.