Fact Check: Viral Post Does NOT Prove Woman Taking Bottles From 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner Was Ukrainian Ambassador To U.S.

Fact Check

  • by: Uliana Malashenko
Fact Check: Viral Post Does NOT Prove Woman Taking Bottles From 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner Was Ukrainian Ambassador To U.S. Unconfirmed

Did a viral post prove that the woman collecting wine bottles at the 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner was Ukraine's Ambassador Olga Stefanishyna? No, that's not true: The post did not include any evidence to support the identification. On the night of the shooting at the event, Stefanishyna looked different from the woman shown in the video.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) by the X account @aleksthgrt on April 27, 2026. It opened:

❗️Identity of thieving woman who stole the champagne & wine from the table during Trump's assassination attempt revealed as Ukrainian Ambassador to the USA Olga Stefanishyna. 😂 Too funny...

The post included a ten-second video, and this is what it looked like on X at the time of writing:

Screenshot 2026-04-28 at 14.07.32.png

(Image source: post by @aleksthgrt on X.)

The earliest version of the recording found by Lead Stories was published by the @CoffindafferFBI account on X on April 27, 2026 (archived here). The caption, however, said nothing about the specific identity of the person in the video, as the clip went viral (archived here).

Neither that version of the video nor the post reviewed in this fact check provided a high-resolution frontal close-up sufficient to identify the woman with certainty.

Stefanishyna (archived here) posted photos (archived here) taken before and after the shots were fired on Facebook. Those images showed that she was wearing a different -- white or silver -- outfit at the 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner (archived here). Furthermore, unlike the woman in the video, Stefanishyna wore her hair up rather than down.

As of this writing, a search across Google News (archived here) did not show credible news reports linking the Ukrainian ambassador to the bottle-collecting incident.

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  Uliana Malashenko

Uliana Malashenko joined Lead Stories as a freelance fact checking reporter in March 2022. Since then, she has investigated viral claims about U.S. elections and international conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, among many other things. Before Lead Stories she spent over a decade working in broadcast and digital journalism, specializing in covering breaking news and politics. She is based in New York.

Read more about or contact Uliana Malashenko

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