At the end of January 2023, a quote from an interview with one of the richest people in the world, in which he spoke unflatteringly about the authorities in Ukraine, circulated on the news. We checked to see if Bill Gates said this.

According to media reports, Bill Gates gave his assessment of the leadership of the Eastern European country during a speech at the Australian Lowy Institute. It is alleged that he said, in part: “The Ukrainian government is one of the worst in the world. It is corrupt and controlled by a few rich people. I mean it's very sad for the people."

This quote was shared RIA Novosti, Pravda.ru, "Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Moscow speaks", "360", EuroAsia Daily, "Russian spring» and many other news sites. It also went viral on Telegram (in particular, Gates’ statement was published by the channels “Sanya in Florida"(377,000 views), "Russia now"(367,000), "Solovyov"(334,000), "#Montan!"(327,000), "Truthfulness" (287,000) and "Observer" (239 000)), Facebook and other social networks.

On January 23, 2023, the YouTube channel of the independent Australian think tank Lowy Institute released interview the organization's executive director, Michael Fullilove, with Microsoft founder, entrepreneur and philanthropist Bill Gates. The main topics of conversation were healthcare, food problems, climate change and other global challenges. In one of the episodes, Fullilove touched upon the personality of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky:

— Let me ask you a question about Ukraine. Before this conversation, I told you about interview with President Zelensky, which I took remotely on this site. Regarding his leadership qualities, what was your impression of the way he led his country, the way he communicated the urgency of his problem to the world? Are there lessons to be learned from this about how to communicate such issues to the world?

To this Bill Gates replied:

“It’s very impressive how he was able to unite the country in response [to the attack]. People did not expect that Ukraine would be able to stop Russia from taking over the entire country. That is, it agreed that Russia turned out to be much weaker and not as smart as expected, and Ukraine turned out to be much stronger than expected. You know, pre-war The Ukrainian government is one of the worst in the world: corrupt, controlled by a few rich people, truly unhappy for the people of the country. Ukraine has better farmland than the United States. I mean, this is the breadbasket of Europe, an incredible place. So hopefully after the war, when everything is restored, it will first reach the level of the Eastern European countries, and then ultimately the European level. So, this is a country that has great prospects, but at the same time it is destroyed and no one knows how long this war will last.

Thus, in his answer, Bill Gates emphasized that he was talking about the pre-war Ukrainian government. At the same time, the entrepreneur did not specify whether he means war in eastern Ukraine, which has been going on since 2014 (and, accordingly, the government of the times of President Yanukovych), or full scale Russian invasion in 2022. It should be noted that in the Corruption Perceptions Index, Ukraine still occupies a rather modest position (penultimate place in Europe, on a par with some African countries), although after 2013 it made a serious leap from 144th places on 116th. In addition, from February 2022 to January 2023, only some from more than two dozen ministers, and since 2020 the government has been permanently headed by Denis Shmyhal. However, many Russian-language media clearly took Bill Gates's words out of context, taking advantage of the fact that he used the present tense verb is in relation to the government. Specifically, the 11-second fragment the interview, distributed by numerous Telegram channels, begins in the middle of the sentence, with the word “Ukrainian”, and the word “pre-war” is left out of the frame. Among the media that correctly conveyed the billionaire’s answer, for example, “RBC", "Gazeta.ru", News.ru and TV channelConstantinople"