Zelenskyy Death Hoax Spreads on Social Media, Linked to Russian Disinformation

A video of a massive explosion lighting up a city skyline is spreading across social media, along with the claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been killed by a Russian airstrike.

The explosion is real, only it has nothing to do with Ukraine.

Numerous social media posts allege Zelenskyy was killed over the weekend in a Russian air attack.

DW Fact check takes a closer look at this most recent assassination claim and finds the rumor quickly crumbles under scrutiny.

Fake assassination claims going viral

Claim: "Reports claim a Russian airstrike targeted a secure location in Ukraine, allegedly killing President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukrainian media is reportedly covering the incident, though official confirmation remains pending," reads a post on June 20 with 2.7 million views.

DW Fact check: False

Zelenskyy posted a video on his official X account on Tuesday showing him meeting with Mathias Cormann, Secretary-General of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The official OECD X account retweeted the video and confirmed over email that the meeting about Ukraine's bid to join the intergovernmental economic organization took place.

Other details in the claim don't hold up either. Attached to the post, and other identical ones across X, is a 15-second video of a large explosion in a city, with audio of onlookers shouting expletives in English as a bright light fills the screen and mushroom clouds billow out.

A reverse image search quickly reveals that the video is of the famous 2015 Tianjin warehouse explosion that killed 173 people, not of an airstrike in Ukraine.

The post also claims that Ukrainian media is covering the incident. This is not true. A scan of the country’s major news sites, including The Kyiv Post, Kyiv Independent, Ukrainska Pravda, and UNIAN news agency turn up nothing.

Death rumors targeting politicians a common tool of disinformation

This isn't the first time rumors have spread about Zelenskyy's death. Earlier this month, a nearly identical claim spread that the president had been killed in a Russian airstrike — one of the same accounts posted both claims.

And back in 2022, there was a pro-Russia information campaign claiming that Zelenskyy had committed suicide, according to US cybersecurity firm and Google subsidiary Mandiant.

It's not just Zelenskyy. Many social media users were convinced that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been killed in March, even after he made public appearances and tried to dispel the rumors directly.

"Ever since Maduro was captured by the US earlier this year, we have seen an uptick on social media platforms like X and TikTok of AI-generated content claiming that leaders had been captured, arrested or killed," Pablo Maristany de las Casas, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue Germany who specializes in pro-Russia disinformation, told DW.

"This is a development that is particularly powered by generative AI, where AI tools make these unrealistic scenarios become feasible visually for the consumer," he added.

Signs of a coordinated bot campaign

The accounts spreading this news reveal a number of suspicious traits that suggest a network of bots.

There are at least 30 posts with near identical wording, all sharing the same video. About half of them use the phrase "RUSSIAN AERIAL ATTACK" stylized the same way, in all capital letters. At least 12 reproduce the exact same typo, using both a period and an exclamation point in the sentence, "Zelensky has died.!"

Then there's the accounts themselves.

Account names include "Russian Army," "China HD," "America News" and "Israel Defense" with flags as their avatars. They exclusively post so-called breaking news updates and polls, designed to drum up engagement.

"These claims have been shared by seemingly bot accounts on X that have this aesthetic of being aligned with a particular state or the military of a particular state," Maristany de las Casas said.

It's typical to see a spike in disinformation after real-world events.

This most recent rumor spread the day after Ukraine battered Russia with attacks, destroying an oil depot in Crimea. The similar rumor from earlier in June came a day after Zelenskyy wrote an open letter to Putin, asking for a face-to-face meeting.

These types of posts can elicit an "emotional response in audiences that can be quite a powerful medium for actors looking to spread this information and manipulate the information environment online," Maristany de las Casas said.

Edited by: Rayna Breuer, Sarah Steffen