Does a viral image prove that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his wife Olena Zelenska hold Israeli citizenship? No, that's not true: The composite image shared on social media was likely created by AI, online tools showed. Lead Stories found multiple inconsistencies also pointing to that conclusion.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Facebook where it was published by the @dgololobov account on Aug. 31, 2026. The Russian caption read:
Отечество - славлю, которое есть! Немного умеренного патриотизма.
As translated by DeepL, it meant:
I praise my homeland--the one I have! A little bit of moderate patriotism.
This is what the image shared in the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @dgololobov on Facebook.)
Online AI detectors
Two tools, ZeroGPT and FauxLens, concluded that the image of the supposed passports was 95% likely to be inauthentic. The results are shown in the screenshots below:
(Image source: ZeroGPT.)
(Image source: FauxLens.)
Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation
Ukrainian government's Center for Countering Disinformation issued a statement on X (archived here), describing the pictures as "fabricated images". It continued:
...these 'passports' are fake and were created using artificial intelligence tools.
Manual analysis
Google Translate can recognize symbols from images and translate them (i.e., the Hebrew in the viral image). When Lead Stories uploaded the viral composite image to Google Translate, it showed that the place where the document was supposedly issued to Zelenskyy in 2023 by some Jerusalem authority was "Moscow, USSR" -- more than three decades after that country's dissolution (archived here):
(Image source: post by @dgololobov on Facebook. Translation provided by Google Translate.)
Another translator, DeepL, confirmed that the word in question was indeed the name of the contemporary Russia's capital:
(Image source: DeepL.)
In 2023, Ukraine was already at full-scale war with Russia. Zelenskyy's official 2023 foreign travel schedule included no visit to Moscow, nor did it say anything about Zelenskyy visiting Moscow. Since then, he repeatedly -- in 2025 (archived here) and at least twice in 2026, as reported here and here (archived here and here) -- said that he would not go to Russia for even for peace talks.
Each picture in the viral image also contains an audio icon at the bottom right, indicating that the pictures were pulled from videos elsewhere. This reel shares what looks a screenshot of the picture of Zelenska's "passport" (archived here). Within the screenshot, the username of Instagram account @observer1986_30 is visible. As shown in the image below, the @observer1986_30 account was marked by AI ("ИИ" - in Russian):
(Image source: reel by @massage.nails.permanent.makeup on Instagram.)
Lead Stories checked the content published by the @observer1986_30 account. As of this writing, the story with Zelenska's "passport" that seemed to have been captured in a screenshot was not available.
However, the account published (archived here) the image for Zelenskyy on Aug. 20, 2026, as a permanent post. That was a larger version that displayed the last lines on the bottom of the page:
(Image source: post by @observer1986_30 on Instagram.)
The "[new 10-char]" element seen on the second line in the screenshot above didn't match the standards for the machine readable zone of the international passports described in detail on the Department of Homeland Security website (archived here).
The same account on Instagram published other images pretending to be Israeli passports of other public figures. That list included such people as Russia's Vladimir Putin (archived here) and U.S. President Donald Trump (archived here). Images claimed they received Israeli passports on the same day as Zelenskyy and his wife.
Hive Moderation and Sightengine ruled that those images were 99% likely to have been made with AI, too. Those results are shown below (click to view larger):
(Image sources: Hive Moderation and Sightengine.)
(Image sources: Hive Moderation and Sightengine.)
A very similar version of the image claiming to be proof of Zelenska's Israeli citizenship has been online since 2023 (archived here). Multiple fact-checking organizations addressed such issues as misspelled Hebrew words and the expiration date predating the issue date, which was seen in a bigger, uncropped version of the image. Ukrinform, Ukraine's state-owned national news agency, reported that Israeli passports of those who repatriated to that country before dissolution of the Soviet Union listed Ukraine, not "USSR" as place of birth.
Lead Stories reached out to Ukrainian and Israeli embassies in the U.S. for additional comments. If we receive a response, this article will be updated, as appropriate.
Repeated claims
False claims about Zelenskyy's supposed multiple citizenships have been circulating online since the first year of the full-scale war waged by Russia against Ukraine. In 2022, Lead Stories debunked a version of it that included a counterfeit image of a purported Russian passport. In 2025, Lead Stories published a fact-check about the picture claimed to have been a real document confirming Zelenskyy's Israeli citizenship that misspelled the name of the Ukrainian president.
