Since leaving the paper under mysterious circumstances in the summer of 2023 and relocating to London, Kovalev has split time writing commentaries for Foreign Policy and attacking reporters at The Grayzone, whom he has falsely painted as Russian assets, while calling for their imprisonment.

"The Grayzone is Russia's US-based disinformation laundromat," Kovalev ranted in a July 2024 blog post. "This conspiracy blog's founders, Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal, help the Kremlin disseminate its false narratives in exchange for favors from a senior Russian government official Dmitry Polyansky, the country's deputy ambassador to the UN. They act as unregistered foreign agents and should be investigated by the Department of Justice for possible FARA violations."

Nearly every word Kovalev wrote was false; The Grayzone has no financial or political relationship with the Russian government, and none of its reporters have received favors from Polyansky or any other Russian official.

Now that the self-exiled troll's former employers at Meduza have been plunged into a financial crisis by the Trump administration's pause on foreign development assistance, Kovalev's smears of The Grayzone have been exposed as an exceedingly embarrassing exercise in projection.

As The New York Times reported this February 26, grants from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) reportedly accounted for 15% of the outlet's budget. So while The Grayzone accepts no foreign state support, it turns out that Meduza can not survive for a day without a constant cash infusion from its government sponsors in Washington.

Meduza's covert US funding was revealed in a New York Times article lamenting the Trump administration's dramatic cuts in funding for various US-financed destabilization and regime change programs across the world. According to the Times, the cuts to USAID could potentially damage Meduza's operations more than "cyberattacks, legal threats and even poisonings of its reporters."

The outlet went on to note that while a handful of other Western countries like Germany and Norway "contribute to independent media," their share is "tiny in comparison with American funding." Simultaneously, "many traditional media supporters" – including the CIA-connected Ford Foundation, and George Soros' Open Society Foundations, a "giant grant maker" – have "abandoned much of [their] media funding." A Columbia University lecturer complained the Trump administration's aid pause was "really a blood bath."