The news was spread by a fake account posing as an employee of a car dealership, but the Bugatti office itself denied this information.
The Ukrainian First Lady will become the owner of a Bugatti Tourbillon car worth 4.5 million euros — such information is shared by pro-Russian sources. Propagandists refer to a video of a man posing as an employee of the French Bugatti office, who alleged that he showed Zelenska a new car two weeks before the official premiere. The first lady apparently liked the car so much that she immediately purchased and paid for it, as the corresponding invoice allegedly shows.
This is not the first time that pro-Russian sources have spread news about Olena Zelenska’s alleged exorbitant expenses — previously we refuted reports that the President’s wife spent more than a million dollars on Cartier jewelry and spent 40,000 euros on New Year’s shopping during a business visit to Paris.
Screenshot — Telegram
However, this news once again turned out to be fake. The Instagram account of the so-called Bugatti employee who first spread the information has all the hallmarks of a fake page. It contains only 4 posts, which are stock photos of cars, the first of which was published just a few days ago. And yet the profile has more than 5 thousand followers. Most likely, these are bots designed to give greater credibility to the page. After the news spread, the profile first went private and then was deleted altogether. We have not been able to find any evidence online that a person named Jacques Bertin works or has ever worked for Bugatti. Moreover, the site of the French «media» Verite Cachee, which was one of the first to publish this news, was created less than two weeks ago, namely on June 22. There is every reason to believe that this is a propaganda resource created specifically to spread Kremlin narratives, which only masquerades as real Western media.
To be completely sure we reached out to the Bugatti press office. The company’s marketing and communications director, Nicole Auger, told us that usually Bugatti does not disclose personal information of its customers, but this time they decided to make an exception and conduct an internal audit. It turned out that Olena Zelenska did not buy a Bugatti Tourbillon or any other cars of this manufacturer.
Russia spreads disinformation about the so-called luxurious purchases and extravagance of Volodymyr Zelenskyi and his closest circle in many languages and in different countries — similar fakes are also recorded in European and Latin American countries. Read more about the spread of this narrative in the study Zelensky and his wife spending Western money on luxury goods or squandering war resources: the cross-border disinformation campaigns circulating from Georgia to Argentina, prepared by our partners, Spanish fact-checkers from Maldita.es.
