In June 2023, reports appeared on the RuNet that the first lady of Ukraine received a passport as an Israeli citizen during a visit to this country. A photo of the document page is provided as confirmation. We have verified the authenticity of this photo.
Elena Zelenskaya arrived to Israel on June 19, 2023, starting his working trip with a meeting with the country's President Isaac Herzog and his wife Michal. The next day, June 20, Russian Telegram channels and media circulated the news that the wife of the Ukrainian president had allegedly received an Israeli passport. The proof was a photo of the main page of the document with Zelenskaya’s data. Some posts claim that the passport has been issued June 19, in others - 18th.
The authors of some of the messages about Zelenskaya receiving Israeli citizenship do not doubt the reliability of the information - for example, in the Telegram channel “Sanya in Florida”(370,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), which also says: “So, the clown [Zelensky] has or will have the same one.” This is what they are, Ukrainian patriots.” Channel "Rita Ebzeeva“(72,000) based on a viral image, claims that “the issue of Zelensky’s resignation has already been resolved, [and] escape routes have been worked out.” Similar posts appeared in the channels "Urgent and accurate" (18,000), "Lev Sharansky | Official channel" (14,000), "Before everyone else. Well almost. Special operation" (12,000) and "Odessa public television Z"(6000). Other authors indicated that the news may be unreliable by adding words like “likely” and “possibly” to the text of their publications. For example, this is what they did in the channels “Sheikh Tamir"(148,000 views), "Ostashko! Important" (120,000) and "Russia"(17,000). There are also posts in which the photo is ironically called fake and photoshopped - they are posted, for example, in the channels “Alexander Semchenko" (93,000), "Russian format" (51,000), "Ilya Kiva - ZOV blood" (31,000) and "Mikhalkov on Telegram"(13,000). Similar messages can be found on VKontakte (examples here, here And here), Twitter (here And here), "Zene", on some news websites and in the media, including “Pravda.ru"
The first thing that catches your eye when you carefully examine the viral photo is the discrepancy between the issuance (06/19/2023) and expiration dates (06/18/2023) of the passport. It turns out that this document was already invalid, since its validity expired the day before it was allegedly issued to Zelenskaya.
Journalists of the fact-checking project StopFake note, that many fields of the passport are filled in with errors, since the words are written from left to right, although on Hebrew write and read from right to left. Thus, the last name is indicated incorrectly (הקסנלז instead of זלנסקה), name (הנלוא instead of אולנה), nationality (ילארשי instead of ישראלית) and place of birth (תוצעומה תירב instead ברית המועצות). In addition, when writing nationality, one letter is missing from the word.
In addition, on the document page being distributed, different fonts are used in some columns, although they should match. This is one of the traditional signs of a fake, since the authors of fakes often take, for example, a template of a real document as a basis, and then can't pick up faithful fonts for the inscriptions that they want to add. The differences are most noticeable in the letters A and S, and the numbers 1 and 9.
This is the Israeli passport template, registration which is very similar to “Zelenskaya’s passport”, in open sources found our colleagues from Vox Ukraine: the type, place of issue, location of stamps and year of birth are the same (this explains the difference in the writing of numbers on the fake). This is the same image issued one of the first names when searching for “Israeli passport” on Google. Moreover, this is a passport template outdated sample.
As a passport photo, the creators of the fake used part of Zelenskaya’s photo, which was taken on April 9, 2023. appeared in the Telegram channel of the First Lady of Ukraine. It was a still frame of her video message on opening exhibitions "Futuromarennya. Ukraine and the avant-garde"in the Estonian art museum KUMU.
The earliest publication with a viral image that “Verified” was able to find appeared June 20, 2023 at 14:06 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Shaman Rahu” (3400 views). This channel more than once featured in our analyzes as the primary source and distributor of fakes, and also not of the highest quality. For example, they posted a fake photo there monkeys named Zelensky from the USA, fake photo textbook stories of Ukraine with Zelensky on the cover, fake sketches of a “more youthful” clothes priests of the OCU and a fabricated photograph walls with a portrait of Biden in the office of the director of a Zaporozhye school.
Cover photo: social networks
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