If one cares to remember, it wasn’t that long ago a story appeared (quickly suppressed) about the elite in Ukraine buying expensive real estate in Switzerland. The immediate question at the time was where all that money was coming from. Haven’t heard any more about that.
That was another fake story, as all of these are.
“A headline from Newspunch, a site that has spread misinformation in the past, states: “High-ranking Ukrainian officials caught splurging on luxury real estate in Switzerland.”
The headline spread to Facebook, and was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)
The article said its claims are based on a “fact-checked” Newspunch investigation. It links to tweets from @AZMilitary1, which has previously spread misleading information about Finland’s ties to Nazis and other topics.
Newspunch’s article and the related tweets claim to show Swiss land registry documents and allege that three people who have ties to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy purchased multimillion dollar properties in Gstaad, a Swiss resort town. The officials named are Dmitry Razumkov, a politician, Oleksandr Danyliuk, a former National Security and Defense Council secretary, and Lyudmila Denisova, a former human-rights official. Denisova has since said that her firing was initiated by Zelenskyy.
But the documents are fake. The Land Registry Oberland in Bern, Switzerland, keeps records about properties in Gstaad. Adrian Mühlematter, the Land Registry Oberland’s managing land registry administrator, told PolitiFact that the documents about t