Did Russian President Vladimir Putin bomb a villa in Ukraine that U.S. President Joe Biden owned? No, that's not true: There is no evidence that this happened or that Biden owns a villa in Ukraine. When searching for credible articles about the claim that Biden owned a villa in Ukraine, and that Putin had bombed it in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, there were no results that corroborated this claim.
Neither is there evidence for the claim that Russian forces have been "hammering biolabs & pedophile rings" in Ukraine. The claims were made in an article on a self-described satirical website whose disclaimer says it publishes articles for "entertainment purposes." In a Foreign Policy magazine article, a journalist writes that the theory that Putin is destroying biolabs in Ukraine comes from conspiracy theorists.
The claims appeared in an article published by Real Raw News on March 2, 2022, titled "Putin Bombs Biden-Owned Villa in Ukraine while Hammering Biolabs & Pedophile Rings" (archived here). It opened:
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday told President Trump that Russia's military destroyed a multitude of foreign bioweapon facilities that had been running carte blanche in Ukraine until his military took decisive and strategic action to rid the corrupt nation of what he called satanic influence, a Mar-a-Lago source told Real Raw News ... Moreover, Putin said his fighter planes had destroyed a Biden-owned, 200-acre villa 35km west of Kyiv. He insisted that Biden was deeply enmeshed in Ukraine's criminal enterprises, and promised Trump that he'd soon give the world 'all the evidence it needs.'
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
Putin Bombs Biden-Owned Villa in Ukraine while Hammering Biolabs & Pedophile Rings - Real Raw News
(Source: Real Raw News screenshot taken on Fri Mar 4 18:36:11 2022 UTC)
Lead Stories used Google to search for evidence of the claims in this article. These searches (here and here) did not result in any credible evidence to support the claim.
There also is no information publicly available to substantiate the claim of Bidin owning a villa in Ukraine.
Lead Stories has previously debunked a claim alleging there are U.S.-run bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
In a Foreign Policy article titled, "False Claims of U.S. Biowarfare Labs in Ukraine Grip QAnon," journalist Justin Ling writes about how the theory that the U.S. has a multitude of biolabs in Ukraine and that Putin is destroying them comes from QAnon conspiracy theorists and is not based in reality.
Real Raw News has a long history of publishing false claims in mock news stories, many of them about convictions and executions of various public figures at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. For example, the site reported former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was hanged (she wasn't); former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta was executed (he wasn't); and that "the military" convicted former Attorney General William Barr on charges of treason (it didn't).
The website for Real Raw News includes a disclaimer that warns readers not to take its content too seriously. Specifically, it says:
Information on this website is for informational and educational and entertainment purposes. This website contains humor, parody, and satire. We have included this disclaimer for our protection, on the advice on legal counsel.
(Source: RealRawNews.com screenshot taken Tue Aug 3 16:39:48 UTC 2021)
Lead Stories has covered claims published by Real Raw News in the past. Previous Lead Stories debunks of Real Raw News items is collected here.
More Lead Stories fact checks about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine conflict can be found here.
