Russian propaganda spreads fake story about Zelensky family’s ‘secret departure’ before war

Propagandists used artificial intelligence tools to generate forged passports for a fabricated narrative.

Russian state-controlled broadcaster NTV and a network of Telegram channels have circulated a story claiming that President Volodymyr Zelensky secretly sent his wife and children out of Ukraine just hours before Russia’s full-scale invasion, allegedly using forged passports. The report also claims that businessman Tymur Mindich organized the supposed operation.

The story is false.

First, NTV’s report contains no verified evidence of any “secret evacuation” of the Zelensky family and exhibits characteristics commonly associated with Russian disinformation campaigns.

Second, the report features images of documents allegedly belonging to members of the President’s family. However, the published images contain numerous signs of forgery and inconsistencies with official Ukrainian documents.

For example, in the alleged passport of Olena Zelenska, the color and font used for the surname and given name differ from the rest of the document’s text elements, suggesting possible digital manipulation.

In the purported passport of the President’s daughter, there is an empty line between the surname and given-name fields, while the patronymic is missing altogether. Additionally, the letter “І” in the name resembles a different symbol, and the month of birth appears as an unreadable string of letters that does not correspond to any month of the year. Such anomalies are commonly found in AI-generated or digitally altered images.

Similar inconsistencies appear in the document that propagandists claim belongs to the President’s son. For instance, the name is written as “Ggor” instead of the likely intended “Ihor,” and the arrangement of several fields differs from that of authentic Ukrainian documents. The patronymic is also absent.

Furthermore, according to the fabricated story, Zelensky’s son was allegedly taken abroad using a 1994-style internal passport, despite the document indicating that the child was born in 2013. This would have made him nine years old at the time of the full-scale invasion.

Such a scenario is impossible. In Ukraine, citizens receive their first passport only at the age of 14. Moreover, since 2016, Ukrainian passports have been issued primarily as ID cards, while the issuance of the old 1994 passport booklets has been discontinued except in limited cases defined by law and court decisions. A nine-year-old child could not have possessed a Ukrainian passport in any form.

The NTV report also recycles another Russian disinformation claim alleging extravagant spending by Olena Zelenska. It features a woman presented as a French stylist of Moroccan origin named Amina El Mansouri, who claims that Ukraine’s First Lady spent €1 million on clothing and accessories in Paris.

This claim has already been debunked by Ukrinform fact-checkers. No such stylist exists. The woman shown in the video is an actress whose appearance was altered using deepfake technology.

The falsehood of the claims has also been highlighted by Ukraine’s SPRAVDI Center for Strategic Communications. The center emphasized that there is no verified evidence or official documentation indicating that the President’s children used forged documents or altered personal data to cross a border.

The authors of the report failed to provide any documents that could be independently verified and presented no confirmation from Ukraine’s State Border Guard Service or any other official authority.

The fabricated story about the Zelensky family’s alleged “secret departure” is another example of Russian disinformation and forms part of broader efforts aimed at discrediting Ukraine’s leadership and undermining trust in state institutions.

As previously reported by Ukrinform, Russian propaganda earlier fabricated claims about a supposed “secret escape” by Olena Zelenska carrying millions of euros in cash.

By Andrii Olenin