Did the Russian representative to the United Nations, Vasily Nebenzya, publicly say "It is important to understand that by supplying weapons to Texas, Russia does not become a party to the conflict"? No, that's not true: A transcript of the United Nations Security Council meeting where Nebenzya purportedly said that shows he said no such thing. That meeting was in February 2023, a year before the border controversy between Texas and the US government. Online indexes of thousands of news sources found no report Nebenzya made a statement about supplying weapons to Texas.
The claim appeared in an article published by Hal Turner Radio Show on January 27, 2024, titled "Russia to Supply Weapons to Texas if needed to Fight Biden Border Heist" (archived here). It began:
Russia may supply heavy weapons to Texas so as to defend itself and its Border from any attempt by Biden to forcibly re-open the Texas Border to illegal aliens.
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
(Source: Hal Turner Radio Show screenshot taken on Tue Feb 6 14:17:28 2024 UTC)
The Hal Turner article claimed that Russia would supply weapons to Texas "if needed" so it could defend itself from President Joe Biden's attempts to let "illegal aliens" across the state's border. The article also claimed that Nebenzya publicly stated, "It is important to understand that by supplying weapons to Texas, Russia does not become a party to the conflict." The article does not mention when or where Nebenzya made this statement. But, the accompanying photo was traceable.
A reverse image search (archived here) of the photo in the article led Lead Stories to a Russian news article (archived here). In that article, the same image appears, with a caption declaring the photo was taken on February 23, 2023, during a United Nations (UN) Security Council meeting. The article was translated from Russian to English using Google Translate.
Lead Stories then searched the PDF of the transcript of the February 23, 2023, Security Council meeting on the UN website. The transcript did not show any evidence that Nebenzya said what the Hal Turner article claims he did. Here is a screenshot of Lead Stories searching for the quote and getting zero results:
(Source: Documents.un.org screenshot taken on Tue Feb 6 17:33:16 2024 UTC)
Searching for "Vasily Nebenzya AND 'supplying weapons to Texas' AND Russia" (archived here) , Lead Stories found no evidence of such a statement in the thousands of credible sites indexed by Google News.
Lead Stories reached out to the Russian Mission to the UN. We will update this article when we receive a response.
Hal Turner Radio Show
The Hal Turner Radio show has a website that regularly deals in conspiracy content. Lead Stories has fact checked it on multiple occasions.
Other Lead Stories articles on Russia are here. Other Lead Stories fact checks about early 2024 events in Texas are here.
