Does a viral clip confirm that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave Monaco bombing suspect Anastasiia Berezovska a military award in 2022? No, that's not true: The rumor was based on a doctored clip. The real footage of the award ceremony didn't show people who looked like Berezovska.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X by @GarbageHuman24 on July 20, 2026. It opened:
Newly obtained footage shows Zelensky standing next to Anastasia Berezovska in March 2022. She was a Ukraine Security Service officer. Years later, she's accused of bombing a Zelensky critic in Monaco now she ends up missing near Kyiv.
This is what the thumbnail from the video attached to the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @GarbageHuman24 on X.)
Berezovska was named a suspect (archived here) in a high-profile Monaco assassination attempt on Vadym Yermolaiev (archived here), a former Ukrainian citizen and one of the country's wealthiest entrepreneurs. A woman who was with him and a child were injured as well.
Later, Berezovska was found dead (archived here). In the aftermath, a Ukrainian security officer was reported to have confessed to her murder but then reversed himself (archived here).
The narrated clip in the X post lasted for 1 minute and 21 seconds. In part, it showed a blurry wide shot of a group of people that appeared to include the Ukrainian president surrounded by people wearing military fatigues:
(Image source: post by @GarbageHuman24 on X.)
As the clip transitioned to a medium shot, the face of the woman to the right of Zelenskyy became more recognizable:
(Image source: post by @GarbageHuman24 on X.)
The InVID plugin that allows media organizations to verify videos and photos, however, suggested that the face of the female officer in question from the viral video was 70% likely to be an AI-generated deepfake:
(Image source: InVID.)
A search across Zelenskyy's official account on Telegram led to a longer, better-quality recording (archived here, here, here, here and here) capturing the same scene of handing out military awards to Ukrainian service members. However, unlike the post reviewed in this fact check, it was posted on Dec. 6, 2022, and the faces of the female officers seen next to the Ukrainian president were different:
(Image source: post by @V_Zelenskiy_official on Telegram.)
(Image source: post by @V_Zelenskiy_official on Telegram.)
Lead Stories also used a face comparison tool, which found that the woman in the digitally altered video was not the same person as Berezovska:
(Image source: Facepair.com.)
The same claim was also reviewed by Nice-Matin.
