Original article (in Serbian) was published on 02/03/2023
A year after the start of the war in Ukraine, fake news and manipulations about this conflict continue to spread. On the web portal Pravda.rs, a claim appeared suggesting that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky demanded from Americans to send their children to the current war. This is, however, a manipulative claim that was created by taking part of Volodymyr Zelensky’s statement out of context.
“ZELENSKY SHOCKED THE WEST: America to send sons and daughters to war”, this the headline of the text published yesterday on the web portal Pravda.rs, and it is added below that the citizens of the USA are “shocked” by this alleged request. The same claims were published on the Pretres News YouTube channel.
“The US will have to send its sons and daughters as we send our sons and daughters to war. And they will have to fight, because we are talking about NATO, and they will die too”, writes Pravda, quoting Zelensky.
An 18-second video in which Zelensky utters these words is used as “proof”.
This news was also shared in the Facebook group “Russia in the heart”, which has over 93,000 members, and where it has collected 150 likes so far. The comments mostly include derogatory words and a negative narrative towards Zelensky.
“Just hope so, you fool for destroying the poor people, idiot”, and “Now that’s a real request so that Americans can see what it’s like to die for Nazism”, are some of the comments found below this post.
However, even though Zelensky did say such a sentence, it was taken out of context, so Pravda’s claim is manipulative and inaccurate.
What did Zelensky actually say?
At the press conference marking one year since the start of the war in Ukraine, on February 24, 2023, the Ukrainian president answered questions from journalists around the world. The video with English translation is available on YouTube.
A journalist from American ABC asked Zelensky to comment on the fact that, according to research, the number of Americans who believe that the US is helping Ukraine “too much” in this war is growing.
In his answer, Zelensky presented a hypothetical scenario: if Ukraine loses support, Russia may attack the Baltic countries, members of NATO. America would then, he concluded, have to send its children to that war.
“If Ukraine loses because of different opinions, weakening and exhaustion, Russia will enter the Baltic states that are members of NATO and then the USA will have to send its sons and daughters the same way we send our sons and daughters to war. And they will have to fight because we are talking about NATO, and they will die too. God forbid because it’s a terrible thing”, said Zelensky in his answer to the journalist, which you can hear in its entirety at 1:37:14.
Pravda, therefore, selectively included in its text only one sentence that Zelensky spoke that day, thereby implying, in combination with the rest of the text and the title, that Zelensky made a “request” that Americans send their children to the current war.
Besides in Serbia, this claim also appeared on Twitter accounts in English, as reported by the American fact-checking web portal Snopes.
