1 of 5 Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, at the UN Assembly on September 19, 2023 Photo: Caitlin Ochs/Portal Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, at the UN Assembly on September 19, 2023 Photo: Caitlin Ochs/Portal
A website created by a former American Marine now living in Russia fueled a rumor that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had purchased two luxury yachts with U.S. aid money.
The accusation is false, but misinformation has spread. It went viral on the Internet and was repeated by American congressmen responsible for key decisions about the country's military spending.
The accusation was unbelievable. Zelensky used two consultants as proxies and reportedly paid $75 million (approximately R$366 million) for two yachts. Not only has the Ukrainian government flatly denied the story, but the two ships in question were not even sold.
But even if it is false, the story reached members of the American Congress and its leaders claim that any decisions on new aid to Ukraine will be postponed until next year.
Some members of Congress vehemently oppose offering more help.
On .
Republican Senator Tom Tillis, who supports military support for Ukraine, spoke to CNN shortly after senators held a closeddoor meeting with Zelensky last week.
“I think the idea of corruption came about because some said people were using the money to buy yachts,” Tillis said. “[Zelensky] turned people away from these ideas.
Tillis contradicted another Republican senator, JD Vance, who also mentioned Zelensky and the ships in the same sentence.
“There are people who would take money from welfare and drive our grandparents into poverty, why? So one of Zelensky's ministers can buy a bigger yacht?” Vance said in a podcast hosted by Steve Bannon, former adviser to Donald Trump. He discussed budget priorities.
Although the yacht story is false, the BBC discovered that the story was boosted by a Russialinked website supposedly hosted in Washington. Researchers say it is “likely a tool with a specific purpose for creating narratives linked to the Russian government.”
The “Washington” website links to Russia
The story first surfaced in late November on an obscure YouTube channel with only a handful of followers and a single video available.
The following day, the news was published on a website called DC Weekly, along with photos of the two yachts, titled “Lucky Me and My Legacy,” and documents that purportedly confirmed the sale of the vessels to Zelensky's associates.
But luxury yacht dealers from the company where the two ships were for sale declared the allegations to be false. The sales documents are apparently fake.
And instead of being bought by Zelensky or his close advisors, “Lucky Me” and “My Legacy” are still for sale.
2 of 5 The yacht Lucky Me is still for sale — Photo: BEHNEMAR The yacht Lucky Me is still for sale — Photo: BEHNEMAR
The DC Weekly report sparked a flurry of online speculation. Numerous sources published links to the story and its contents, which were mentioned on various platforms.
But the site is not a weekly publication as the name suggests. It's not even based in the American capital.
Studies by disinformation researchers Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University in the US concluded that DC Weekly was founded by John Mark Dougan, a former US Marine and former Florida State Police officer who moved to Russia in 2016 .
Dougan served as a deputy in the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office in Florida for three years. After his departure in 2009, he started a website to spread rumors about his former employer.
Since moving to Russia, he has reinvented himself as a journalist covering the invasion of Ukraine spreading numerous false and unfounded claims. One of them was that Russia tried to destroy biological weapons laboratories.
Clemson researchers have found that DC Weekly is full of stories copied from other websites and rewritten by artificial intelligence machines. The site's “reporters” use fake names and their photos are copied from elsewhere on the Internet.
Dubious original news is mixed in with the rewritten reports, apparently to give the site an air of legitimacy.
One of these reports was the origin of the rumor about the yachts. Clemson researchers tracked the story as it went viral after DC Weekly's version was published.
Evidence collected by researchers suggests that the website continued to be hosted on the same server as several other John Mark Dougan websites. BBC Verify has also discovered that part of the DC Weekly website is hosted on a server in the Russian capital, Moscow.
Earlier this year, Dougan was identified as a commentator for DC Weekly on several lectures he gave at an academic institution affiliated with the Russian Foreign Ministry.
“It's pretty obvious to me that Dougan has been with DC Weekly for a long time and continues to be committed to the infrastructure behind the site,” Warren said.
3 out of 5 The DC Weekly website features artificial intelligencerewritten reports and original stories with false information Photo: DCWEEKLY The DC Weekly website contains artificial intelligencerewritten reports and original stories with false information Photo: DCWEEKLY
John Mark Dougan said via text message that he “absolutely denies these allegations” and that he sold DC Weekly for $3,000 (approximately R$14,600) several years ago.
He said he could not remember who he sold the site to and that he lost the documents after being banned from payment platforms and losing access to email accounts due to financial sanctions against Russia . It states that this has no relation to the current operation of the website.
Researchers claim the website is part of a much larger proRussian propaganda machine.
“It doesn’t really matter much whether that specific person is behind the site,” Warren said. “The bottom line is that the website is an important element of a very effective and substantial proRussian influence operation that needs to be reported on and understood.”
Regarding the DC Weekly report, the Ukrainian president's office stated that “all information in the report is false. Zelensky and his family do not own yachts and have never owned one.”
We asked Tom Tillis and Marjorie Taylor Greene for their comments.
A spokesman for JD Vance said: “For years, everyone in the West recognized that Ukraine was one of the most corrupt countries in the world. For some reason, everyone forgot about that when we started sending them billions of dollars in development aid.”
The yacht case is another fictional story about existing concerns about corruption, which is a longstanding problem in Ukraine. Facing this is one of the requirements that the country would have to meet in order to join Western institutions such as the European Union.
Ukraine ranks 116th out of 180 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, although its position has improved significantly in recent years.
However, compared to the online comments about fake stories based on fake documents and shady social media accounts, little attention has been paid to the country's actual ongoing corruption problems.
In October, a widespread accusation emerged on social media that President Zelensky's wife had spent a fortune on jewelry in New York, United States, during the Ukrainian president's stay in the city to address the United Nations.
4 out of 5 The woman accused President Zelensky's wife of causing his dismissal before sending a fake receipt for 1.1 million US dollars (approximately R$ 5.4 million) Photo: YOUTUBE
As with the yachts, this accusation originated on a YouTube channel with very few followers and only one video featuring a woman claiming to be from Benin. She said she worked at the Cartier store on 5th Avenue in New York.
The woman showed a receipt dated September 22 with the name Olena Zelenska and an invoice for US$1.1 million (about R$5.4 million) for a bracelet, earrings and a necklace.
However, facial recognition tools found a close match between the woman in the video and photos on the social media profiles of a woman living in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Looking at the pictures, she seems to be the same person from the YouTube video.
The story went viral on Facebook, TikTok and Telegram. The Russian Embassy in the UK X account shared the case with the comment: “Best use of British taxpayers’ money in history.”
But the receipt is clearly a fake. On September 21st, the Zelensky couple had already left New York and traveled to Canada.
And an Englishlanguage website was instrumental in spreading the rumor: DC Weekly.
5 of 5 President Zelensky and his wife Olena arrived in Canada on September 21st Photo: @ZELENSKYYUA President Zelensky and his wife Olena arrived in Canada on September 21st Photo: @ZELENSKYYUA
Researchers from BBC Verify and Clemson found several reports published in DC Weekly between August and December of this year that followed the same pattern.
They presented the false claim that Britain's Prince Andrew, brother of King Charles III, had secretly visited Ukraine; that Ukraine supplied weapons to Hamas; that a U.S. nonprofit organization harvested organs in Ukraine; and that the Zelensky government had allowed Western companies to use Ukrainian agricultural land to dispose of toxic waste.
DC Weekly's reports were often published days after the allegations first surfaced on YouTube.
In addition to DC Weekly, some of the allegations (including those relating to Cartier jewelry and yachts) were also published on several proKremlin Englishlanguage websites, as well as on reputable African journalism websites that accept . And some of the reports were used by other portals and social media accounts.
But with the yacht story, the people behind DC Weekly have apparently achieved unprecedented success. His accusations were repeated by some of the most powerful people in the US Congress.