While the new US administration is trying, unsuccessfully, to broker a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, the fakes about Donald Trump supposedly deciding on the best candidate for Ukraine’s presidency started to spread online. Let’s get into debunking.
What happened?
Our fact-checking bot Perevirka received several requests to check if the current American president Donald Trump really named the one who’ll become “the best president of Ukraine.”
Posts talking about this were shared by anonymous Telegram channels, referring supposedly to Ukrainian and foreign media. They said, for instance, that BBC Ukraine reported on Trump saying that Petro Poroshenko was the best president.
“American president openly supports Petro Oleksiiovych’s candidacy for the elections. And want to negotiate specifically with him,” this Ukraine BBC supposedly writes.
In the other post, based on what seems to be NBC News’ report, it’s said that the best person for Ukraine’s presidency is, according to Trump, Yulia Tymoshenko.
“The American president openly supports Yulia Volodymyrivna’s candidacy for the elections. He empathized that it is her who can most efficiently negotiate.”
Analysis
For the first step, we’ve checked the official resources of NBC News and BBC Ukraine for these reports.
We found out that after January 20, 2025 (Trump’s inauguration), there was no mention of Tymoshenko in the reports of NBC News. The latest article about her was published on November 6, 2019.
As for BBC Ukraine, since January 20, there has been only one article mentioning Poroshenko and Trump (and Tymoshenko) there. It was published on March 6 on the website and in social media of BBC Ukraine.
The article talks about Ukrainian politicians’ reactions to the rumors that they supposedly met high officials from Trump’s circle and discussed if Ukraine can hold the election “before peace negotiations,” which Politico wrote about, based on anonymous sources.
Poroshenko wrote a post on Facebook where he said that he and his team always has been and is against elections during war.
“The nature of our conversations with the American side always came to two main things — security first and peace through strength. Specifically, weapons, intelligence data, sanctions against russia, financial support, democratic resilience (freedom and democracy, transatlantic unity,” Poroshenko wrote.
Similar position was expressed by Yulia Tymoshenko. She posted on Facebook saying that there “can’t be anything to say” about elections in Ukraine during the war.
None of these politicians said anything about a personal meeting with Donald Trump. This information also cannot be found neither in official sources, nor on the website of political parties (1, 2).
Next, we analyzed photos that were used in Telegram posts.
The photo with Poroshenko and Trump was taken in the Oval Office during the first personal meeting of Ukraine’s 5th president with Trump in June 2017.
A photo of Tymoshenko and Trump was shared by the parody account on X — the account posts Tymoshenko pictures created by a neural network.
The account’s description of @ZUBAZHYNKA says that the content on X is published “just for the sake of parody, not connected to a political party.”
Finally, having analyzed the text part of both messages, we’ve checked the link they’ve led to. They say that Trump supposedly launched a vote for Ukrainians — and that’s what hides clickbait. After clicking any links in the posts, users go to the form requesting to join anonymous Telegram channels.
So, the messages spread through anonymous Telegram channels that Trump seemingly picked “best candidate for Ukraine’s president” are fake and clickbait-y, launched to increase the number of subscribers to the target Telegram groups.
Conclusion: Fake, clickbait
Author: Olha Yakovleva
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