Polish media accidentally published footage of Zelenskyy’s body double.
The footage was first published by Ukraine’s state broadcaster and appears to show the president’s head of security Maksym Donets, who has been photographed with the president many times over the years.
A number of posts on Facebook and Twitter claim that Polish media “accidentally recorded” footage of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s supposed “body double” during the visit to Kyiv by US president Joe Biden on 20 February 2023.
Some have specifically claimed “Zelensky's latest blooper makes its slip on live television broadcast, where possible BODY DOUBLE fails in his ONE JOB of laying low, putting to question the reality of his heroic visits to Bakhmut and Kherson warzones”.
But the man circled in the video appears to be President Zelenskyy’s head of security, Maksym Donets, who has been photographed with the president many times since 2019, when he was first appointed as head of the president’s bodyguard team and deputy head of Ukraine’s Department of State Protection.
Many other photographs from the same day show Mr Donets standing close behind Mr Zelenskyy and Mr Biden.
He can also be seen in photos with the Ukrainian president since before he was first elected, in France later that year and in Ukraine in 2019.
Mr Donets was clearly photographed multiple times walking through Kyiv with Boris Johnson and President Zelenskyy during a visit by the former Prime Minister in April 2022. Finnish publication Ilta-Sanomat wrote about him in November 2022, and included various photos of him over the years. Other footage of him has been collated by an apparent fan page on TikTok.
The screengrab and videos in the post seem to have been taken from the website of Polish tabloid Fakt. However, the video credits the Ukrainian state broadcaster, UATV’s English YouTube channel as its source for the footage. The video remains on their YouTube channel as well as on President Zelenskyy’s official Facebook page.
We’ve checked misinformation about President Zelenskyy before, including false claims that a photo of him in front of a green screen shows he hasn’t really remained in Ukraine, his office was blown up by Russian forces and he sold vast amounts of land to US companies. False information about the Ukrainian president has the potential to affect people’s opinions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the man is publicly known as the head of the Ukrainian president’s bodyguard team.
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