DISINFO: The information that Zelensky bought the Hitler's car looks reliable
SUMMARY
Volodymyr Zelenskyy [...] after his visit to the USA returned home with a purchase [...] a car that once belonged to Adolf Hitler. [...] This is a 1939 Mercedes-Benz 770K Grosser-Offener-Tourenwagen. It is often called the super-Mercedes. It was ordered by Adolf Hitler, created for him, and used by him. In July 1940, it was used by Hitler at the Victory Parade held in Berlin after the defeat of France. The Nazi dictator’s Mercedes-Benz, captured by the US Army after the war, is one of five surviving cars.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was recently spotted getting out of this car in Kyiv, right in front of the building on Bankova 11, where the office of the President of Ukraine is located. This happened just a couple of days after his return from his successful diplomatic trip to the United States. The estimated sale price is believed to be around $15 million.
RESPONSE
Pro-Kremlin disinformation claim, part of a long series of claims aiming to defame Ukrainian president Zelenskyy, supporting the disinformation trope of Nazi Ukraine.
Pro-Kremlin media refer to "the Western media Seattle Tribune".
The Seattle Tribune is not a real media outlet. BBC Verify's Shayan Sardarizadeh reported that no such news outlet based in Seattle exists and that the website was only set up in the past week "specifically to post this fake story." Its articles often portray Ukraine as a Nazi state and call for diminishing US support for Kyiv. The Seattle Tribune said that the screenshot of the car allegedly parked in front of the Ukrainian President’s office was taken from the Ukrainian Telegram messenger channel Realna Viyna. In reality, this channel did not publish such a post. It is a montage composed of different images.
The Seattle Tribune website was registered only a few days before the publication of this story; the Internet Archive shows what it looked like on October 3, 2024: not a single story had been published there yet, The Insider found out.
The host of the Kremlin TV channel admits that "the news could be fake". However, he then insists that the news "spread widely", referring to other pro-Kremlin and Russian State controlled media outlets, because it "seems very credible and possible". Guests in the studio also comment on the "news" as credible and, after having determined that Zelensky has 15 million US dollars to purchase Hitler's car, pass directly to the subject of "Nazism in Ukraine".
The myth of Nazi-ruled Ukraine has been the cornerstone of Russian disinformation about the country since the very beginning of the 2013-14 Euromaidan protests, when it was used to discredit the pro-European popular uprising in Kyiv and, subsequently, the broader pro-Western shift in Ukraine's foreign policy. In their attempt to prove that Ukraine is a Nazi state, pro-Kremlin media outlets often spread crude fabrications. See examples here and here. They also distort history of the WWII, to prove that modern Ukraine is "gloryfying the nazis". In other reports, pro-Kremlin media outlets claim that "Ukranians turned into animals" and therefore spread hatred towards Ukrainians, disguised as "anti-nazism" narrative.
Read our analysis titled Key narratives in pro-kremlin disinformation: “Nazis” and "Why does Putin portray himself as the tamer of neo-Nazism".