A Facebook post shared false claims about Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, including the allegation that he owns a $35 million home in Florida.
The April 17 post was shared by Nicolas Tetrault, a former Canadian politician, and features a TikTok video of a screenshot of another social media post.
"The president of Ukraine owns a 35 million dollar home in Florida, and has $1.2 billion in [an] overseas bank account," the post in the TikTok video read. "Zelenskyy owns 15 homes, three private planes and has a monthly income of 11 million dollars."
The post implies Zelenskyy misappropriated Ukrainian aid money to buy the homes and planes.
In a caption with the video, Tetrault echoed the post’s sentiments and also falsely claimed Zelenskyy was the cousin of billionaire philanthropist George Soros — which PolitiFact rated Pants on Fire.
Tetrault’s post has since been deleted, but it’s a claim that still circulates on social media.
The post was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
The video does not provide proof to back up its claims, and the TikTok account that shared it no longer exists.
The earliest mention of the claim we could find on the internet was from a post on Feb. 23, 2022, on a website called EPrimeFeed. The site appears to only publish posts written by anonymous authors, and the claim was published the day before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The post...
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