Two American carmakers have donated 100 pickup trucks and SUVs to assist with humanitarian aid in Ukraine. But an Instagram post makes the baseless claim that the vehicles were provided at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
Verdict: False
There is no evidence of the purported claim on either the U.S. Department of Defenseâs website or SpaceXâs website. Musk has also never publicly mentioned any such joint project with the U.S. military.
Russia has lost as many as 25,000 soldiers in its invasion of Ukraine, with tens of thousands more injured, according to estimates from U.K. and U.S. officials.
Russia's economy will contract as much as 6% this year mostly because of international sanctions, the country's central bank predicted.
Thousands of educated professionals have fled the nation after the war began, according to news reports.
Our ruling
Putin stated that Russia has lost nothing since the country invaded neighboring Ukraine in February.
Russia has suffered many losses. As many as 25,000 Russian soldiers are estimated to have died. Indicators from within Russia show the Russian economy has been damaged by international sanctions resulting from the war. And experts say thousands of Russians from many professional backgrounds, including tech and academia, have fled the nation.
We rate Putin's claim False.
A phone call recording from 2016 between then-Vice President Joe Biden and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was leaked in 2020, but as it recirculates in 2022, it's wrongly being used to claim Biden threatened to kill the former head of state.
Biden, among other presidents, has used the term "physical security" regularly. In August, for example, Biden talked in a speech to the Democratic National Committee about the United States' need to plan its direction wisely to ensure "economic, political and physical security." As in the leaked phone call, Biden, speaking June 30 at a press conference in Madrid after a NATO summit, tied funding from the U.S. to aid Ukraine's fight against Russia's invasion to the country's physical security.
"But for it to end, they have to be in a position where … the Ukrainians have all that they can reasonably expect, we can reasonably expect to get to them, in order to … provide for their physical security and their defenses," he said.
We rate claims Biden threatened to assassinate a former Ukrainian president Pants on Fire!
U.S. Army members aren't in Ukraine, according to the Department of Defense.
The Pentagon relocated National Guard members in February who were training Ukrainian military members in February.
There were 160 Florida National Guard troops training Ukraine's military when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin temporarily relocated them to Europe in February. And 3,000 more American troops from the 82nd Airborne were also deployed to Europe from Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
The National Guard has continued to support Ukrainian soldiers remotely, according to the Army. For example, a June article on the Army's website shares how a Ukrainian soldier called a member of the Washington Army National Guard for help with a failed anti-tank missile.
But we rate claims that U.S. Army forces are stationed in Ukraine False.
This photo has nothing to do with the Ukrainian national movement and with the events of the 1943 Volyn tragedy. The children in the photo were killed by their own mother Marianna Dolinska on the night of December 11-12, 1923, in the village of Antoniowka near the Polish city Radom.
There is no proof that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a net worth of $596 million or receives a monthly income of $11 million.
Leaked financial documents showed Zelenskyy had several assets like real estate property and cars, but not enough to corroborate the claim made on Facebook.
A report by Forbes found the Ukrainian president's net worth was closer to $20 million to $30 million.
Our ruling
A Facebook post shared a screenshot from a website claiming to show Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's net worth as being $596 million while receiving a monthly income of $11 million and a salary of $780,000.
The website featured in the Facebook post offered no corroborating evidence for the claim.
Leaked financial documents showed Zelenskyy did have some assets, but nowhere near what's being claimed on the website and Facebook post.
A report by Forbes found his net worth to be much smaller, around $20 million to $30 million.
We rate this False.
