False: An image still from a video shows Oleksandra Zelenska, Volodymyr Zelenskyy's daughter, disowning her father for killing Ukrainian people during the Russian invasion.

By: Ranjini K
May 13 2022

Share Article:

An image from a 2017 video of a girl tearfully begging for an iPhone 7 from a man has been mislabeled as Volodymyr Zelenskyy's daughter.Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, there have been many false and misleading posts concerning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on social media. One such post by Bryansk Anthony (@1098Bryan) states that "Oleksandra Zelenskaya, Zelenskyy's daughter, disowns her father. She calls him a Nazi and a murderer of the Ukrainian people: Russians, Ukrainians, I want to tell you what is happening there." The post also included an image of a girl weeping while sitting in a vehicle. However, this is false. The girl in the image is not Zelenskyy's daughter, and it is not related to the Russia-Ukraine war. By performing a reverse search, we found the same image of the girl in a YouTube video uploaded on August 24, 2017. In the video, the girl was tearfully pleading for an iPhone 7 from another person while sitting in a car. Nowhere in the video could we hear Zelenskyy's name, nor anything related to the Russian invasion. This confirms the video is older, and unrelated to the Russia-Ukraine war. 5-tv.ru, a Russian online publication, cited the same video and identified the girl as Anastasia. It reports that she sobs and demands that her boyfriend buy an iPhone 7 for her, further confirming that she is not Zelenskyy's daughter. A comparison of a picture of Zelenskyy's daughter Oleksandra posted on Instagram on her 15th birthday in 2019, with the image of the girl in the viral post confirmed that both are different persons. According to an article published in People Magazine, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and his wife, Olena Volodymyrivna Zelenska, have a 17-year-old daughter, Oleksandra, and a 9-year-old son, Kyrylo. The article also carries a photo of Zelenskyy's family. In an interview with CNN, Zelenskyy said that he gets very little time to spend with his family, and they are out of public view. He added that his children are proud of Ukraine and aware of what's going on in Ukraine, as reported by People magazine. We mark the claim as false because the girl in the image is not President Zelenskyy's daughter; it's a screengrab from a 2017 video where a girl was crying for an iPhone.