, when democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych was overthrown and replaced by a successor government handpicked by the US Those operations included propping up and training pro-Western political parties, funding pliant media organizations, and subsidizing massive privatization drives that benefit foreign multinational corporations, all in an effort to secure US control over the country that NED President Carl Gershman called "the biggest prize" in Europe.

Demwashing the CIA

The National Endowment for Democracy was set up in 1983 by the Reagan administration after a series of public scandals had seriously undermined both the credibility and the public image of the CIA. That the organization was established and continues to function as a cutout group doing much of the agency's dirtiest work is not in question. "It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA," Gershman himself said, explaining its creation. "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA," NED cofounder Allen Weinstein told The Washington Post in 1991.