At the beginning of October 2023, reports appeared in the media and social networks that the children of Zelensky and other Ukrainian high-ranking officials could be given Spanish citizenship at the request of the EU. We decided to check if this is true.

Since October 5, photographs of a letter allegedly sent to the Spanish King Philip VI by the President of the European Council Charles Michel and the head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen began to circulate on Telegram channels. This document allegedly contains a request to grant Spanish citizenship to the sons of Vladimir Zelensky, ex-Minister of Defense of Ukraine Alexey Reznikov, Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk, Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba and other Ukrainian officials, as well as the children of Belarusian oppositionists Svetlana Tikhanovskaya and Valery Tsepkalo. This was reported, in particular, by the Telegram channel “Tsargrad-TV"(33,000 views at the time of writing the analysis, website Pravda.ru and Russian "Channel 5"

The authors of posts about the sons of Ukrainian civil servants and Belarusian oppositionists provide a photo of the document in English and Spanish. In the upper left corner is the logo of the European Council, in the upper right corner is the place and date: Brussels, 8 September 2023. The letter is addressed to the King of Spain, and the text of the document contains a request “taking into account extraordinary circumstances, to provide residence permits” to 21 specified persons.

The document, distributed on blogs, is similar in design to the standard electronic press release issued by the European Council. Fact checker project Stop Fake I found a letter on the council’s website that is almost identical in design. This letter dated September 9 with condolences to King Mohammed VI of Morocco, whose country suffered a devastating earthquake.

On the left is a fake letter to Philip VI, on the right is a real letter to Mohammed VI

If we compare these two documents, the disproportionality of the signatures under them becomes noticeable, although in both cases the letters begin with the words “We, members of the European Council.” To this authority included not only Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, but also all heads of state and government of the EU. That’s why there are so many signatures on the real letter, but only two on the fake one.

In the press releases section on the European Council website there are no other letters to monarchs for this period, and on September 8, only three documents were published: on sanctions for human rights violations in Ukraine, Charles Michel’s comments before the G-20 summit and the announcement of the signing of an agreement on border control with Albania.

Special attention should be paid to the Spanish version of the document. In the very first line there is a mistake in the word “Majesty”: in the title Right it is written Majestad, and in the first sentence - Maiestad. There are also typos in the English version: for example, in the third paragraph the word kingdom (“kingdom”) is written with a capital letter, although rules lowercase must be used. The term residence permit by nature (literally “residence permit by nature”) could not be found on specialized websites.

The spelling of the listed names is also striking: in official documents, the European Union uses transliteration from Ukrainian, not Russian: not Alexander, but Oleksandr, not Andrey, but Andriy, not Dmitry, but Dmytro.

Finally, the Georgian fact-checking site “Myth detector» asked for comment from the European Commission and the European Council. The representative of the European Commission for Foreign and Security Policy, Peter Stano, confirmed that the distributed letters are fake.

Thus, the letter in which European officials allegedly ask the Spanish king for privileges for the children of Ukrainian politicians and Belarusian oppositionists is a fake. The earliest publication found by “Verified” and containing a photo of a fake document is a post in the pro-government Belarusian Telegram channel “Belarusian cuisine"(1400 views), which appeared on October 5 at 08:55 Moscow time. This suggests that the purpose of the fake could have been primarily to discredit the Belarusian opposition.

Cover photo: Charles Michel and Vladimir Zelensky, September 19, 2023. Website of the President of Ukraine.