At the beginning of November 2022, media and Internet users distributed a leaflet in which the US Republican Party allegedly promised to abandon military support for Kyiv. We have verified the accuracy of such publications.
November 8 in the USA passed congressional elections - candidates competed for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate. In the weeks leading up to the vote, material support for Ukraine became an important theme of the election campaign. In mid-October, experts from the Kiel Institute of World Economics assessed the volume of assistance allocated to Kyiv by Washington is $52.3 billion, including $15.2 billion in direct financial support. Some Republican Party Representatives criticized Democratic President Joe Biden for insufficient control over the use of these enormous resources and disproportionate attention to overseas problems in relation to domestic ones (among them, record inflation and insufficient security of the US southern border were mentioned). On November 5, Georgia House of Representatives member Marjorie Taylor Greene at a rally in support of Donald Trump in Iowa stated: “Under the Republicans, Ukraine will no longer receive a penny!”
On the morning of November 9 on the air of the Rossiya 24 TV channel reported: “Republicans openly stated before the congressional elections: if they win, aid to Ukraine will be stopped. Photographs of leaflets that representatives of the “Reds” distributed to voters at polling stations appeared on American social networks. They say: “Say no to military aid to Ukraine.” The borders of the United States are paramount. The Republicans reminded Kyiv: under them, Ukraine will have to account for every dollar that the Democrats have already spent on it.” The story also showed a photo of the leaflet. The night before, similar materials appeared in “Arguments and facts" and on the TV channel website "Constantinople"
Also on November 8, posts about this leaflet appeared, according to the TGStat service, in more than 800 Telegram channels. The largest of them are “Ax Live"(4.11 million subscribers at the time of writing this analysis), "Live broadcast" (3.38 million), "Media Russia is not Moscow" (2.76 million), "Truthfulness"(1.3 million), Voblya (1.29 million), "Operation Z: Military Correspondents of the Russian Spring" (1.15 million) and "Observer????"(1.04 million). TV presenters told their subscribers about the republican leaflet Vladimir Solovyov (1.39 million), Ruslan Ostashko (337,000) and Artyom Sheinin (180,000), writer Zakhar Prilepin (303,000), "voenkor" Yuri Kotenok (433,000), as well as frequent speakers of Russian state media Scott Ritter (656,000) and Yakov Kedmi (150,000). Users also shared information Facebook*, "VKontakte", Twitter And LiveJournal.
Since the call outlined on the leaflet concerns foreign policy issues, it is logical to assume that she is campaigning to vote for the Republican Party in elections to the US Senate or House of Representatives (on November 8, the country also held elections for 36 state governors and a number of campaigns at the local level). Both houses of the American parliament are elected not by party lists, but by single-member districts. The propaganda materials that we were able to familiarize ourselves with contain at least name and slogan of the candidate, at most - his photo and a quote or promise. Since a significant part of the constituencies voted for representatives in both houses of parliament, the leaflets also often indicated which mandate the candidate was seeking - this was supposed to help the voter not get confused at the polling station. With such introductory information, a leaflet that calls for voting for abstract Republicans looks suspicious.
The wording on the supposed propaganda material also raises questions. It uses the expression Ukraine must account for every single dollar the US has spent on their heads (media and Telegram channels translate it approximately as “Ukraine will have to account for every dollar that the US spent on it”). At the same time, we did not find the expression to spend on somebody’s head in English dictionaries (literally “to spend on someone’s head”) - it is not found in British Cambridge Dictionary And Collins Dictionary, neither in American Merriam-Webster. The native English speakers we interviewed reported that they were unfamiliar with such phraseological units.
Pages outside the Russian-language segment of the Internet that talk about this leaflet are extremely few. Among them are English-language versions of the Russian portal “Military Review" and a resource advertising PMC "Wagner" Soldat.pro, some forums And aggregators posts from social networks. In social networks themselves (for example, in Twitter) you can find several dozen posts in foreign languages, some of them contain direct links to Russian pro-government Telegram channels. Note that only a very small part of such publications is written by Americans; more often their authors (even if they write in English) indicate Russia, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and other countries as their place of residence.
However, this photograph, apparently, was actually taken in America. In the background you can see part of the pharmacy sign (pharmacy, the first five letters are visible in the photo), which completed in the same style as the corresponding divisions of the Walmart network. At the same time, this photo is the only evidence that Internet users use to support their statements about the entire campaign of the US Republican Party. We were unable to find any other photographs of the flyer being tested or even a written record that an American voter actually received it.
The earliest post we could find using this single image was posted on Telegram in the early hours of November 8th. At 10:30 Moscow time, the corresponding post appeared in the channel “Tough of the day"(1.55 million subscribers). This anonymous channel was created in May 2017 and initially published “interesting facts” about the world around us, then began posting videos of road accidents, fights, scenes of cruelty to animals and other types of violence. Currently, “Tough of the Day” is also available under the username @zvoinaukraina.
Thus, hundreds of publications about the leaflet, which was allegedly massively distributed by representatives of the Republican Party in the United States before the parliamentary elections, are based on one photograph that first appeared in the Russian-language segment of the Internet. Although the photo appears to have been taken in the States, the leaflet depicted is significantly different from typical campaign materials, and its caption uses an expression that is not found in English. American users of social networks began to talk about this leaflet in very few posts after it became viral in Russian-language Telegram channels. Moreover, in their publications there are no other photographs of her, nor any details that could indicate that the leaflet was printed in more than one copy and was actually distributed by Republican supporters in the run-up to the elections.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social network Facebook, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: Telegram
Most likely not true
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