Verification within Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program
There is information circulating online that on December 22, 2018, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine allegedly published a tweet stating that Volodymyr Zelenskyi is a “naked clown” and an “American puppet” and that he will destroy Ukraine “with the help of NATO”. The Ministry of Defense also supposedly called for not voting for Volodymyr Zelenskyi.
However, there was no such post from the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
Screenshot of the post
We did not find such a post about Volodymyr Zelenskyi in the official Twitter account of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. An advanced search on Twitter also did not show any results mentioning the tweet. With the help of the Internet Archive tool, we decided to check whether such a post existed, however, there is no such tweet in the archived version of the account of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.
We also did not find the tweet by searching for keywords in English and Ukrainian. References to this tweet are shared only by Russian mass media and users of the Russian-speaking segment of social networks.
Earlier, we refuted a photofake, which showed a photo of a table with an inscription about leopards and Zelenskyi in the Berlin Zoo.
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