In April 2024, media and Telegram channels reported that the President of Ukraine spent £20 million to purchase an ancient estate from the English royal family. We have verified the veracity of such publications.

On April 3–4, Russian media, including “Vesti.ru", "Russian newspaper", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Arguments and facts", "Constantinople", Sputnik, "Moskovsky Komsomolets" And Pravda.ru, reported that Vladimir Zelensky acquired luxury real estate in the UK. The authors of the notes claimed that the Ukrainian president acquired the Highgrove House estate in Gloucestershire from King Charles III. It is clarified that the monarch has owned the mansion since 1980, the deal allegedly cost Zelensky approximately £20 million and was brokered through his wife Elena during her visit to the United Kingdom at the end of February. Some publications noted that the information was based on rumors, while others claimed that the information was obtained as part of a journalistic investigation using open data.

The news began to spread in Telegram channels a day earlier. According to the TGStat service, posts about Zelensky’s purchase of a mansion in the UK received a total of more than 6 million views. Among the most popular are publications in the channels “Live broadcast"(936,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Operation Z: military correspondents of the Russian spring"(512,000), "Gossip"(343,000), "Observer"(228,000), "Thirteenth"(197,000), Voblya (178,000), "Putin on Telegram"(177,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(156,000), Rus_criminal (144,000), "Voice of Mordor"(139,000), "Ivan Utenkov"(139,000), "Ukraine.ru"(129,000), "Kirill Fedorov / war history weapons"(117,000), "Alexander Semchenko"(111,000), "Ostashko! Important" (106,000) and "Pool N3"(103,000).

The message went viral outside the RuNet. In particular, it was talked about in English in verified profile Russian Embassy in South Africa. They also wrote about Zelensky’s allegedly recently acquired British real estate on French, Dutch, Italian and other languages

Both the media and Telegram channels in their publications referred to the note, released in the London Crier in early April (the exact date is not indicated on the website). The anonymous author of this piece writes that while Buckingham Palace has not released a statement about the deal with Highgrove House, "there are many details indicating that the sale was completed in late February/early March 2024." In the article itself, only one such detail is given - a comment from a certain Grant Harold, allegedly a butler at this estate in 2004-2011. He said that at least six people working at the mansion were informed that their contracts would be terminated as of March 21.

A four-minute video is also attached to the note, published on YouTube. The recording mainly consists of a compilation of photos, videos, stock images and screenshots, which is accompanied by a voice-over (presumably the man speaking the text, the author of the investigation, appears in the video for just a couple of seconds). Basically, the content of the video repeats what is stated in the article, but the video ends with the inscription “Since February 2022, the United Kingdom has allocated almost £12 billion in comprehensive support to Ukraine. On 12 January 2024, the government announced a further £2.5 billion in funding for 2024–25.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jkle7w2EvM

Until April 2024, the London Crier had not been featured in any major media as a source of news or investigative journalism. There is no “About Me” section on the publication’s website (instead there is a description of the WordPress template with which the resource is designed), and the “Rules of Use” section contains a set of words in Latin, usually used by designers when creating templates. Notes on the site are published with captions like brian.tran12 or owen.cook14. The author of the article about Zelensky’s purchase of an estate in Gloucestershire is listed as admin.

According to Nominet, a company that registers sites in the .uk domain zone, the site londoncrier.co.uk, where a note about the change of ownership of Highgrove House was posted, appeared only March 26, 2024. To the same results leads and researching a web address using the Who.is service. At the same time, in the “basement” of the London Crier website it is said that the publication has been published since 1863, that is, it is assumed that it decided to start its website more than 160 years after its founding. Moreover, this media does not have accounts on social networks (icons with logos on the site lead to the pages of the creator of the WordPress template).

Bot Blocker Project analyzed and other information about this resource. It turned out that londoncrier.co.uk uses the same DNS servers as the website sanfranchron.com, created in March 2024 and posing as a page of the American newspaper San Francisco Chronicle. Through this (and another) non-existent media at the end of March into the information space was thrown in a fake that Zelensky’s plane carried 300 kg of cocaine from Argentina, allegedly obtained during the Ukrainian leader’s visit to the inauguration of the new Argentine president.

As the fact-checking project Snopes found out, as of April 3, at least one article on the website of the London Crier, an ostensibly British publication with more than a century and a half history, was written in Russian (publication is currently unavailable). Moreover, “Verified” randomly selected and examined the names of three photo files that are used to illustrate the notes (1, 2, 3). All these names coincided with the titles of articles published at the end of March on the Gazeta.ru website (1, 2, 3) and accompanied by the same photographs. We previously discovered the same feature on The Boston Times website, which served as the primary source for many viral publications about Zelensky and Argentine cocaine.

The video used in the London Crier note was published on March 31, 2024 on the Sam Murphy YouTube channel with 310 subscribers. He was registered On February 5 and until the end of March it remained empty. On March 30–31, three videos appeared on the channel: about real estate owned by Charles III, about the participation of his niece Princess Eugenie in an event dedicated to Easter, and about Zelensky’s proposed purchase of the royal estate. All three videos are narrated by different voices, but the channel’s profile photo uses a screenshot from the video about the purchase of Highgrove House - it depicts a man presumably reading out the voice-over text. Services for reverse image search and searching for people depicted in photographs did not produce any results. The author of the channel was probably generated by a neural network (for example, to this conclusion came experts interviewed by The Independent).

In fact, the only evidence cited in the article and video is the words of Grant’s butler Harold, who allegedly worked at Highgrove House for the then-Prince Charles more than ten years ago. Harold - quite famous in Great Britain people. After completing his service at court, he began to write a relatively popular blog about the intricacies of etiquette, and also acted in television shows. Representatives of the ex-butler in comments to the agency dpa, TV channel France 24 and newspaper The Independent called the claims attributed to Harold in the London Crier article "totally false".

Finally, fact checkers from the Italian Open project ordered an extract on Highgrove House from a specialized website owned by the British government. In the document indicatedthat as of April 5, 2024, the owner of the estate was Prince William. The mansion went to the heir to the British throne from his father, along with his titles, when Charles III became king after the death of his mother Elizabeth II.

Thus, the reports that circulated in the media and social networks that Zelensky bought a mansion worth about £20 million from Charles III are based on the publication of a website that, without any basis, poses as a respectable British media outlet. This resource, judging by the available evidence, is part of a network of similar fake publications disseminating pro-Kremlin propaganda. The evidence of the transaction used in the note was falsified.

This is not the first time that pro-Kremlin resources have used this scheme to spread fakes about luxury real estate allegedly purchased by the family of the Ukrainian president in different parts of the world. In December 2023, publications went viral that Zelensky had acquired the Goebbels estate near Berlin, as well as villas in the USA and Egypt. How then found out “Verified”, to promote all three stories, first an alleged insider’s revelation or an investigative journalist’s story was posted on almost empty YouTube channels, then the retelling of these videos was rebroadcast by little-known publications or resources imitating the media, and their notes were referenced by Russian media controlled by the authorities and bloggers supporting the Kremlin.

Cover photo: Office of the President of Ukraine