Original article (in Montenegrin) was published on 07/04/2022
The President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is constantly under disinformation attack, and pro-Russian media and social media users are constantly trying to present him as a Nazi.
After photo-montages with Nazi symbols and claims that he is promoting those symbols on his clothes, Zelensky is now being tried to connect with a neo-Nazi from Ukraine.
A collage of photos of a girl with Nazi symbols who is claimed to be the niece of President Zelensky has been shared almost 500 times on Facebook.
“Support for the young niece of Volodymyr Zelensky, who hoisted the libertarian flag in the destroyed Mariupol and then took a rocket launcher and started the fight against the fascists. She wrote a message to the Russians on the rocket: “Death to the Orthodox”. These are the people who deserve the support of the whole world”, states the text featured above the photos with a link to the alleged official account of the Metropolitan of the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, Mihailo Dedeic.
The link leads to a Twitter account of Metropolitan Mihailo Dedeic, which, among other things, publishes photos of people with Nazi insignia. Among them is a photomontage of photos from the protest in Cetinje, where Nazi symbols were added to Ukrainian flags, which we have written about earlier.
Certainly, this is not the official account of Mihailo Dedeic, as claimed on Facebook.
Also, the girl in the photos is not the niece of President Volodymyr Zelensky, but a well-known Ukrainian neo-Nazi, Victoria Vita Zaveruka.
Zaveruka became known to the public in 2015 when the French magazine “El” made a report about her, calling her “the Ukrainian Joan of Arc”. They later apologized, stating that they did not know that she was a neo-Nazi.
So, the photo does not feature the niece of Volodymyr Zelensky, it does not represent the current conflict in Ukraine, nor was it published on the “official account of Mihailo Dedeic”.
Therefore, we rate this post as fake news.
The “fake news” rating is given to the original media report (entirely produced by the media that published it) that contains factually incorrect claims or information. Content assessed as fake news is created and disseminated to misinform the public, that is, to present a claim that is entirely false as fact.