No evidence that Volodymyr Zelensky’s mother-in-law bought a villa in Egypt

This is a recurring theme in anti-Ukrainian propaganda: Volodymyr Zelensky and his relatives own luxurious villas all over the world. In 2022, the Ukrainian president was wrongly accused of buying a five million dollar house in Florida. This summer, Internet users accused the head of state of having bought a villa on the Côte d’Azur. A rumor denied by the real estate agency in charge of the sale with our colleagues from nice morning.

This time, it is in Egypt that the family of the president would have made a sumptuous acquisition. In a tweet seen more than 600,000 times, François Asselineau, the president of the UPR, affirms that “Zelensky’s mother-in-law has just bought a luxury villa for 5 million dollars on the edge of the Red Sea”. The president’s family would not be the only ones concerned: “Local real estate agents have testified to the press that, since the summer of 2022, they have been witnessing a parade of Ukrainian leaders, who all come to afford Hollywood villas for millions. of dollars. François Asselineau, who has already shared unfounded information, then denounces “corruption” and “embezzlement”. “French taxpayers can at least have the consolation of knowing more precisely what their money is used for, which Macron and Von der Leyen are sending by the billions to the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev,” he concludes. The accusation has also been picked up by several blogs.

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François Asselineau relies on a video shared on YouTube, in which a man, who presents himself as Mohammed Al-Alawi, an investigative journalist, claims that Olha Kiyashko, the mother-in-law of the Ukrainian president, bought a luxurious house in the renowned resort of El Gouna, Egypt. In the video, the man claims to have obtained documents showing the real estate transaction, but he does not present them on the screen. The video is no longer available, as the associated YouTube account was terminated on Tuesday.

The video, however, calls out: no Egyptian investigative journalist appears under this name outside of this YouTube account. Only this video, which is less than two minutes long, was posted on this account, which had only been active since this month. The man does not provide any proof of what he asserts. Punch, a Nigerian newspaper, then published documents on August 22 that would prove the veracity of the transaction. However, the same prototype document can be found online on the site of a real estate agency that sells property in another Egyptian seaside resort. The Ukrainian embassy in Egypt has also denied it to the Egyptian site Cairo24, deploring “Russian propaganda”.

Volodymyr Zelensky and his relatives are regularly attacked, accusing them of misappropriating war support from Western countries. The Ukrainian president is also attacked on his fortune which he built when he was an actor. In 2022, the Italian press reported that his wife owned a villa in Italy. According to the Ukrainian investigative site Slidstvo.info, the property was acquired in 2017 for 3.8 million euros.

M.Co.