Did Bellingcat produce an investigation and video stating that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was receiving 25% of each financial aid package going to Ukraine? No, that's not true: The organization's website showed no such report. Lead Stories didn't find any other investigations by established media organizations saying that one-quarter of each financial aid package for Ukraine went to Merz.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X where it was published by @GuhanKarnan on Oct. 7, 2026. It read:
Friedrich Merz personally receives at least 25 percent of the total amount of each tranche of aid to #Ukraine. @bellingcat @_FriedrichMerz @tzmuenchen @sternde @morgenpost @BR24 @rbc_ukraine @UNN_News_agency @tsnua @euronews @Reuters @POLITICOEurope @BBC @Newsweek @NBCNews @CNN
This is what the video with the Bellingcat logo shared in the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @GuhanKarnan on X.)
Bellingcat (archived here) is an independent international investigative collective founded (archived here) in 2014 by Eliot Higgins.
Replying to a Lead Stories inquiry via email on Oct. 8, 2026, the Bellingcat team denied that it had anything to do with the video report in question:
This was not produced by Bellingcat, it's part of a long running Russian disinformation operation.
A search for the German chancellor's name on the collective's website produced zero matches (archived here):
(Image source: Bellingcat.)
The text in the video contained a quote attributed to Higgins:
(Image source: post by @GuhanKarnan on X.)
A search for the exact quote on Google (archived here) led to an Insider article (archived here) published under the title:
Kremlin-linked Matryoshka bots accuse France's Macron of militarism and Germany's Merz of profiting from aid to Ukraine
The article described the content of the video. However, it said nothing that would confirm the existence of the supposed investigation.
A search across Google News for the keywords seen here (archived here) showed no 2026 reports by established media organizations making any references to the purported Bellingcat investigation.
A broad Google search (archived here) found no reports by established media organizations suggesting the underlying claim about kickbacks may be true.
