Does a photo in an online article prove that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy bought Hitler's Mercedes during his 2024 trip to the United States? No, that's not true: The article's image of the vehicle, supposedly in front of the Ukrainian presidential administration building, was digitally manipulated. The picture of this antique car has been online since 2018 and was first taken elsewhere.
The claim originated from an article (archived here) published by Seattle-Tribune.com on October 7, 2024, under the headline:
Hitler's parade car bought by Ukraine's Zelensky.
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: Seattle-Tribune.com screenshot taken on Tue Oct 8 13:50:07 2024 UTC)
The article claimed that Hitler's Mercedes, put up for auction in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2018, was seen in front of Zelenskyy's presidential office in Kyiv shortly after his visit to the U.S. in late September 2024 (archived here).
The Ukrainian president did, in fact, visit the U.S. during that time period, but the rest of the story was made up.
Digitally altered image
The article showed an image that was said to have come from a Ukrainian-language Telegram channel, Realna Viyna (Реальна Війна) or "Real War":
(Source: Seattle-Tribune.com screenshot taken on Tue Oct 8 15:30:10 2024 UTC)
A TinEye reverse image search, however, identified two separate pictures of the background (archived here) and the car (archived here). This indicated that a graphics editing program had been used to copy the vehicle and place it in front of Zelenskyy's presidential office building for the image seen on Seattle-Tribune.com:
(Source: TinEye screenshots taken on Tue Oct 8 14:00:08 2024 UTC)
As seen in the screenshot above, the image of the car has been online at least since 2018, and it was not taken in front of Zelenskyy's office -- contrary to the claim, the authentic background suggested that the vehicle was photographed in or near a park.
A textual search on Google (archived here) for the visible sentence fragment from the supposed post on the Realna Viyna channel on Telegram did not show an exact match. A broader search within the channel itself for the subject and verb (archived here) from the same sentence fragment led to other posts incorporating different images. In other words, as of this writing, the picture in question was nowhere to be found on the channel cited as its source.
Hitler's car from the 2018 auction
According to a CNBC report (archived here), after Germany's 1945 surrender in World War II, the U.S. Army confiscated the 1939 Mercedes-Benz 770 Grosser Offener Tourenwagen once used by Hitler. Its two known subsequent owners were wealthy Americans. But in 2018, when the car was scheduled to be auctioned in Scottsdale, the seller remained anonymous. The Mercedes, however, was not sold at the time, as the maximum bid of $7 million didn't reach the minimum asking price (archived here).
A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) showed no credible news reports corroborating that Zelenskyy had bought the vehicle at any point after that.
Ukraine's reaction
On October 8, 2024, Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation (archived here), which answers to the country's National Security and Defense Council, wrote on its page on Facebook (archived here), as translated by Lead Stories staff, that the article about Zelenskyy's purported purchase of Hitler's car was "a fake."
About Seattle-Tribune.com
Despite the legitimate-sounding name, Seattle-Tribune.com doesn't have much of a record: According to the WhoIs lookup tool, the website was registered on October 3, 2024 (archived here) -- four days before the article's publication date (archived here).
The site (archived here) has not posted any contact information or details about who operates or owns it.
According to the Library of Congress (archived here), the real Seattle Tribune was printed in the 1930s and has been out of circulation for decades.
Disinformation researchers have seen such cases before. Previously, a network of similar websites posing as U.S. local news outlets was found to be part of Russian efforts to spread false or misleading narratives (archived here).
Further reading
Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning Volodymyr Zelenskyy can be found here. Stories about the Russian-Ukrainian war are here.
