In a post made by a Twitter account, it was claimed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and George Soros were cousins. The claim in question is shared by social media users around the world.
Zelenski and Soros Cousins?
With the start of conflicts between Russia and Ukraine on February 24, 2022, a lot of misinformation spread on social media. Among them, there were also conspiracy theories. Examples of these are claims such as “Ukraine being the first country to implement the “Great Reset”, “Zelensky wearing a jersey with a swastika”. In addition, George Soros is often the subject of such conspiracy theories. Claims that Soros had some kind of familial or personal relationship with people such as Republican Adam Schiff, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, climate activist Greta Thunberg and Christine Blasey Ford, which had previously come to the fore with his donations, came to the fore and were falsified. A similar claim that has recently spread around the world and in Turkey is that Soros and Zelenski are actually cousins. Some posts even include the detail that this information was announced by the Pentagon.
However, the allegations are completely unfounded. A spokesperson from the Open Society Foundation, a donation organization founded by Soros, said that the posts were conspiracy theories similar to those that had been spread before. The Open Society Foundation’s statement to AP News included the following statements:
“The claim that George Soros is related to someone has formed the basis of many conspiracy theories in the past. This time, the claim that came to the agenda with the President of Ukraine, like the other allegations, is wrong.”
Soros’ personal spokesman, Michael Vachon, also contacted the AP via email, denying allegations that the two are cousins. The spokesperson for the US Department of Defense, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Gorman, also said the claim was false, adding that Pentagon officials were not the source of information, as suggested on the internet. “There’s no truth to this claim, and no one in the Pentagon has ever made such a claim,” Gorman says in an email.
The same claim has been analyzed by many fact-checking platforms such as FactCheck.org, Snopes, PolitiFact, Reuters, USA Today and AP News, due to its rapid spread on social media.
As a result;
The claim that Volodymyr Zelenski and George Soros were cousins is false.
Your sources are weak. Your reporting is weak. You are pushing misinformation and I feel dirty reading it. Do some real journalism