Is the story true about how Zelensky smuggled 300 kg of cocaine from Argentina?

In March 2024, news spread across the Internet about an intercepted telephone conversation, which allegedly proved the involvement of the President of Ukraine in drug smuggling. We have verified the veracity of these messages.

Sensational reports about the transportation of a large shipment of cocaine on Ukrainian Air Force One appeared in the Russian media at the end of March. The authors of these texts, citing publications in foreign media, claimed that the transfer of 300 kg of the drug took place back in mid-December 2023, when Zelensky arrived to Argentina for the inauguration of the country's new president, Javier Miley, and a large international cartel was behind the organization of the operation.

This was reported TV channel "Tsargrad", "Moskovsky Komsomolets", "Arguments and facts", Live24, Newsland, "TV Center", "Public news service» and other media. The news was also actively disseminated on Telegram, including in the channels “Sanya in Florida"(490,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Russia now"(300,000), "Thirteenth"(175,000), "Voice of Mordor" (170,000) and "Sheikh Tamir"(170,000).

While viral posts say the cocaine shipment was part of the Ukrainian government's efforts to reorganize drug trafficking through Eastern Europe, reports that the country's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is using drugs. spread on the Internet at least since 2019, when he announced his participation in the elections. After the start of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this narrative began to be used even more actively in propaganda materials. “Verified” has already analyzed the video recordings, allegedly proving fact of the Ukrainian leader’s addiction, wrote about art installations, depicting Zelensky’s nose with white powder, and also studied the appeals of a number of Western stars (Dean Norris, Malcolm McDowell, Mike Tyson), who called on the politician to get rid of his addiction. All these messages turned out to be fakes.

In notes about drug smuggling on board Zelensky, media and Telegram channels referred to publications in several foreign publications. The main source was the American media The Boston Times, which, in turn, relied on an investigation by Mexican journalist Marcio Forti. In his article, he used an audio recording of conversations between two members of an unnamed international drug cartel, which was allegedly intercepted by Interpol during surveillance of the syndicate's activities. In the recording, one of the drug dealers allegedly directly tells his assistant that the cocaine shipment is intended for the delegation of the Ukrainian president. This information was allegedly also confirmed by Sebastian Salgado, a journalist for the Argentine publication Data Urgente. Many Russian-language publications on this topic were accompanied by video recording his conversation with journalist Olga Garbuz. Some resources also referred to articles on the San Francisco Chronicle and Intel Drop websites.

Let's figure out what these resources are. Bostontimes.org actually has article dated March 25, on which the authors of the notes in the Russian media relied. In the "About Us" section saidThe Boston Times, which dates back to 1972, has been a "lodestar of journalistic integrity" for many years and has won several Pulitzer Prizes. All of these statements are false. There is no printed publication with this name (the newspaper of the same name has ceased existence in 1933), and a winner of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize more than once was becoming The Boston Globe from the same city. Who.is domain name verification service data testifythat the bostontimes.org website was registered in January 2024, and the first articles appeared on it only in March.

The Boston Times logo is not familiar to Google's reverse image search service, meaning it is likely only found on the publication's website. The emblem contains the non-existent words jubinldress, jecelolatcye, ieston, tnensy and uboutelicy. Apparently, the image was generated by a neural network.

Photo files from several articles on bostontimes.org for some reason wear Russian-speaking titles. Apparently these pictures were borrowed from the Gazeta.ru website, and the names of the files became the titles of the corresponding articles.

In some publications about Zelensky’s involvement in cocaine smuggling, the source is not The Boston Times, but San Francisco Chronicle - enough famous American publication that has existed since the mid-19th century. However, the corresponding article is hosted at sanfranchron.com, while Northern California's oldest newspaper uses the domain sfchronicle.com. A resource where they talk about the transportation of drugs from Argentina to Ukraine was registered March 17, 2024 and uses another logo, although it claims to be committed to “fair standards in journalism.”

Moreover, fact checkers from the Italian Open project discoveredthat the sites bostontimes.org and sanfranchron.com as of late March were connected to the same server with a Russian IP address of 95.165.66.27. At the beginning of April the same IP address was at the server on which the site is located vidvist.com — a small hosting of video materials, many of which are dedicated to Donbass. According to research the “Bot Blocker” project, there are many more English-language news sites associated with this IP, and they all broadcast pro-Kremlin narratives. Among them, in particular, the publication DC Weekly (“Verified” has already sorted it out his publications containing unreliable information about Vladimir Zelensky and his wife Elena).

Another source of information about cocaine and the plane of the Ukrainian delegation is the Icelandic publication The Intel Drop. This resource founded in September 2022 and registered in the Netherlands, calls calls itself "an independent news source for the intelligence and financial community" and its editorial staff allegedly includes "current and retired intelligence professionals who collectively fear the level of censorship, scrutiny and outright 'black propaganda' being fed to the general public." At the same time, he repeatedly published fake news about the war in Ukraine. In particular, in 2023, The Intel Drop reported on the Russian impact on a secret NATO bunker in the Lviv region, distributed video recording about the connection of the Elena Zelenskaya Foundation with child trafficking and audio recording sharp criticism by Vladimir Zelensky of a number of Western leaders, as well as news about purchase Ukrainian president of the former villa of Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Education and Propaganda of Nazi Germany.

It's time to look at the sources these supposedly foreign publications rely on for their stories about cocaine smuggling. The Boston Times article contains a link to an investigation published on March 24 by the aforementioned Mexican journalist Marcio Forti on the Medium.com platform. As of early April, this publication had already been deleted from the site along with the entire account, but they managed to archive. Journalist Marcio Forti indeed exists, however, according to his LinkedIn profile, he lives not in Mexico, but in Brazil. Forti's biography says he specializes in geopolitics. In addition to the Medium.com website, the journalist published videos on the Plataforma Multipolar-MEX Youtube channel (@MultipolarMex).

The deleted Medium post contains some interesting details. In particular, this text says that the scandalous call was intercepted in early 2023.

That's just Javier Miley won in the second round of the Argentine presidential election on November 19, 2023, so it would be strange for Zelensky to agree on anything without an official invitation to the inauguration and without knowing the date.

It is also clarified that drug traffickers mention President Zelensky and the Ukrainian delegation. However, if you listen to the intercepted audio recording, which was posted on the Formosa TV Youtube channel on March 21, it will not be possible to find any mention of Zelensky or Ukraine - only the word “president”. As expected, there are no reports of interception on the Interpol website itself. At the same time, Formosa TV is not a TV channel at all, as one might think: it is a page with 265 subscribers, the first videos on which appeared then, on March 21. Almost all the videos on it, with the exception of the wiretap, are reports on drug trafficking, filmed by various Latin American media.

The second source who allegedly confirmed information about drugs from Argentina is local journalist Sebastian Salgado, creator of the YouTube channel Data Urgente. On published March 24 video he talks about this topic with Russian journalist Olga Garbuz, but does not provide any convincing evidence. Salgado is a very real person, famous with his pro-Kremlin position. After 2014, he repeatedly came to Donbass, where he filmed the mini-series “Tango of Freedom in Lugansk.” By data European Platform for Election Observation (EPDE), in 2023 Salgado was an election observer in the Russian-annexed part of the Zaporozhye region. Currently Argentinian works on the HispanTV channel, an Iranian resource that broadcasts to Spanish-speaking countries and has been repeatedly caught spreading fake news. For this reason the channel blocked on YouTube. If in profile Salgado on the website dataurgente.com, click on the icon in the social networks section, then will open Russian hosting page site123.com.

Thus, there is not a single argument in favor of the fact that the story about 300 kg of cocaine for Zelensky and his delegation is true. First, the audio recording used as evidence was published on a newly created YouTube channel, then journalists with a dubious reputation and pseudo-Western media with a common server began to replicate news based on it, and then large Russian media became involved in the process. The same scheme used, for example, when spreading fake news about Zelensky’s expensive real estate in different countries.

Cover photo: screenshot from bostontimes.org

Fake

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