Nonexistent statement made by the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine
A Facebook post cites a statement by Ukraine’s ex-foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, backing it up with a dubious Greek media outlet, which refers to a Twitter user’s post, whose relevance and credibility are hugely questionable. Kuleba’s alleged statement is so provocative, that if it were true, all the relevant media outlets would resound it, but nothing of the sort can be found and all of this is extremely suspicious
A Facebook post cites a statement by Ukraine’s ex-foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, backing it up with a dubious Greek media outlet, which refers to a Twitter user’s post, whose relevance and credibility are hugely questionable. Kuleba’s alleged statement is so provocative, that if it were true, all the relevant media outlets would resound it, but nothing of the sort can be found and all of this is extremely suspicious
Dmytro Kuleba about the Ukrainian government: “There they are all addicted to drugs!” What the former foreign minister said
In support of the quote, the post shares a link to an article by the Greek media outlet Pronews.gr. First of all, although this media outlet has а certain popularity in Greece, it is not among its most relevant media outlets such as Kathimerini, Ta Nea, Ethnos or Eleftheros Typos, a good number of which have survived for decades, if not centuries, first in print and now in online format. The publisher information of Pronews.gr is extremely meagre, it is a relatively young media outlet (since 2006) and has a far weaker reputation.
Secondly and more importantly, the article on Pronews.gr is not based on a serious source, but on a post made by a Twitter user. That tweet is embedded in the Pronews.gr article, and the author of the tweet is a person with the username @Versati51739827, whose relevance and credibility are under a huge question mark. On Twitter, the person describes themselves using the following words:
Grumpy “old man”, retired mariner. Irish born, conservative. Dog lover.
It is not clear why we should trust that person, and the fact that Pronews.gr has given him such publicity is a testament to their unprofessionalism. The twitter user claims Kuleba made his statement in an interview with a Polish media outlet, but does not provide any source or link. The same is uncritically reported by Pronews.gr, also without any link to that interview.
In the comments under that tweet, some users accused the author of spreading fake news (links: here, here and here), to which he replied, explaining how Kuleba made that statement to the Polish media outlet wPolsce24, but once again, without any details or links.
We searched the Polish media outlet (wPolsce24) in Polish language, (Kułeba), as well as the Youtube channel and Facebook page, where content related to Kuleba can be found, including interviews with Polish analysts who talk about him. However, we did not find any interview with him, nor did we find the statement attributed to him.
We continued the search on Google, with keywords in Polish such as: Kułeba, narkomani, uzależniony od narkotyków or similar, but we did not find anything in particular and this also applies to the search in English with words such as: Kuleba, drug addicts, junkies and so on. We were only able to find similar Twitter posts to the one we’ve already described, but they also don’t cite any sources and are valueless (examples: here and here).
Kuleba’s statement is non-existent, and even if it were given, it is so provocative that all the relevant global media outlets would resound it, but there is nothing of the sort. We also checked Kuleba’s Facebook and Twitter profiles, but there is nothing in particular there either.
On another note, the Pronews.gr article also includes a video player, but the footage it plays has nothing to do with Kuleba. Each time the article is opened, the video player loads random clips from the production of Pronews.gr. One time it is news about Donald Trump, then about the African country of Congo, then something about Greece, etc.
Sometimes, those are not news about separate events, rather a collection of news from Greece and the world, in television style with a presenter and a longer duration, but even in those cases we did not find anything about Kuleba’s alleged statement.
In view of the foregoing, we assess the post we are reviewing as false.
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