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Social media users are sharing a collection of AI-generated images, falsely claiming that they are stills from security camera footage of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meeting convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In the pictures, we can see a figure resembling Zelenskyy shaking hands and talking with Epstein, with the accompanying social media posts alleging that the two were close and met each other in intimate, non-public settings on the disgraced financier’s private island.
However, there’s plenty of evidence to prove that the images are fake. Firstly, The Cube, Euronews’ fact-checking team, ran them through Google’s AI platform Gemini, which detected a SynthID on the image.
A SynthID is an invisible watermark developed by Google which shows that all or part of the content was created or modified using Google’s AI tools.
The images are also grainy and low-quality, which is typical of AI-generated content that tries to hide inconsistencies and mimic security camera footage.
Additionally, the timeline doesn’t add up. The pictures show Zelenskyy as he has appeared since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, seemingly wearing his customary green T-shirt.
Epstein, however, died in August 2019, only a few months after Zelenskyy became president in May that year.
There’s no credible evidence that the two ever met. The Cube has trawled through the Epstein files, the latest tranche of which was released at the end of January, and while Zelenskyy’s name does appear in them, it’s only in the context of news reports or the 2019 elections that saw him become president.
There is no evidence of a direct relationship between Zelenskyy and Epstein in the files.
This isn’t the first time that false claims have tried to link the pair. Other fact-checkers have debunked previous instances where pro-Russian Telegram channels spread false narratives of a connection between Zelenskyy, Epstein and human trafficking.
They found that, in those examples too, references to the Ukrainian president were only made in relation to news reports and the 2019 vote.
They also noted other attempts to push the narrative that Ukrainian elites turned a blind eye to human trafficking in Epstein’s network, using doctored videos from reputable news organisations, such as the independent Russian investigative outlet Agentstvo.
Impersonating real and reliable news outlets to spread disinformation is a common tactic used by pro-Russian propaganda campaigns, such as the Storm-1516 operation.
Zelenskyy is a prime and common target of such campaigns, due to a coordinated effort to try to discredit him and ultimately weaken European support for Ukraine as Moscow’s war continues.
The Ukrainian leader is not the only leader to be falsely linked to the Epstein files. France’s President Emmanuel Macron and the leader of the British far-right party Reform UK, Nigel Farage, have also been implicated in the documents.
There is no evidence that Epstein met or corresponded directly with either of them, despite social media claims to the contrary and AI-generated images of them together circulating online.
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