A fake photo circulating online of two alleged Israeli passports belonging to Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife, Olena Zelenska, allegedly shows that the Ukrainian president and his family have chosen Israel as their homeland instead of Ukraine.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
The Facebook post was published at the beginning of September alongside the caption: “You can twist it any way you like, but we always come back to the same point: Zelenskyy and his family have a homeland of choice that inspires, protects and supports him in everything he does, and that homeland is certainly not Ukraine. This is common knowledge, just as it is common knowledge who his backers are at the top of the Ukrainian establishment, but people prefer to turn a blind eye so as not to disturb those pulling the strings. Shalom.”
There is no truth behind these claims. The Cube, Euronews’ fact-checking team, contacted Ukrainian official sources who denied them.
Furthermore, Ukrainian public officials are not permitted to hold multiple citizenships, unlike members of the general public, under a recent law which officially came into effect in January of this year.
Additionally, the false passport belonging to Zelenska lists the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as her place of birth. This is inaccurate, as official identity documents issued for individuals born in Ukraine before independence routinely list Ukraine rather than the defunct Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union from 1922 until 1991.
The Cube, Euronews’ fact-checking team, also ran it through the image detector Hive Moderation, which revealed it to be AI-generated.
The fake passport appears to have been created based on a sample template published on the Council of Europe website.
Fake Zelenskyy passports resurfaced
It’s not the first time false passports attributed to Zelenskyy and Zelenska have circulated online.
In April 2026, an image of an alleged Israeli passport of Zelenskyy was shared on Instagram, X and Facebook, gathering thousands of views, likes and reshares.
These posts claimed that the Ukrainian president was an agent for Israel’s intelligence agency, whose main mission was “to Ukrainianise Europe and lead it to its own self-destruction”.
In addition to a significant portion of the passport being cropped in the image, there is a spelling error in Zelenskyy’s name.
According to the president’s official website, his last name is stylised as “Zelenskyy” in English, not “Zelensky”, as the alleged passport shows.
In fact, stories about Zelenskyy and Zelenska’s alleged passport have been doing the rounds since at least 2023.
For instance, a photo of the first lady was shared on pro-Russian channels and in several Facebook posts.
In one of these posts, the caption can read: “While Ukrainian President Zelensky travels the world begging for money and weapons for his war, his wife spent a lovely vacation in Israel and even obtained an Israeli passport. Interestingly, is Mrs Zelensky preparing for a possible escape from Ukraine?”
All of these posts follow the same playbook: use an AI-generated passport to invent a scandal with some real elements to target Ukraine and undermine support from its allies, as Russia’s war against the country continues.
These techniques are common tactics used among pro-Russian networks in their disinformation campaigns.
The posts about the alleged Israeli passports stand at odds with one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s supposed justifications for his full-scale invasion: when it began in February 2022, Putin pledged to oversee the “demilitarisation and de-Nazification” of Ukraine.
However, as the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, Zelenskyy has Jewish origins and has previously addressed the series of attacks on his religious background by the Kremlin.
“How can I be a Nazi?” Zelenskyy said in 2022, just before the full-scale invasion, in a video address directed at the Russian people in the Russian language. “Explain it to my grandfather, who went through the entire war in the infantry of the Soviet army, and died a colonel in an independent Ukraine.”
