DISINFO: Zelenskyy didn’t warn Ukrainians about Russia’s offensive to save his own government

The claim is a deliberate distortion of the original interview granted by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to The Washington Post and published on 16 August 2022. The goal of this narrative is to try to discredit Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a frequent target of pro-Kremlin disinformation, by portraying him as a selfish leader who doesn’t care about the Ukrainian people.

Zelenskyy never uses the words “offensive” or “military operation”, euphemisms used by pro-Kremlin media to refer to the unjustified Russian aggression against Ukraine. Moreover, Zelenskyy doesn’t say that he chose not to warn the population in order to save his own government, but that creating panic among the Ukrainian population would have been self-defeating and may have destroyed Ukraine’s economy, especially given that Ukrainian authorities believed that the invasion may ultimately not take place.

In the interview, as well as in an accompanying long article about the run-up to the aggression, Zelenskyy and other members of his cabinet explained that US intelligence about the upcoming attack was considered vague and inconclusive “until four or five days before the invasion began”, namely until the Munich Security Conference on 18-20 February, when Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba received specific information about Russia’s attack plans.

This second article includes long explanations about why Ukrainian authorities chose this path:

“We had to strike a balance between realistically assessing the risks and preparing the country for the worst … and keeping the country running economically and financially,” Kuleba said. “Every comment coming from the United States about the unavoidability of war was immediately reflected in the [Ukrainian] currency exchange rate.”

And:

“We took all of the information that our Western partners were giving us seriously,” recalled [Andriy] Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff. “But let’s be honest: Imagine if all of this panic that so many people were pushing had taken place. Creating panic is a method of the Russians. … Imagine if this panic had started three or four months beforehand. What would’ve happened to the economy? Would we have been able to hold on for five months like we have?”.

In the interview, Zelenskyy’s exact words are:

“You can’t simply say to me, “Listen, you should start to prepare people now and tell them they need to put away money, they need to store up food.” If we had communicated that — and that is what some people wanted, who I will not name — then I would have been losing $7 billion a month since last October, and at the moment when the Russians did attack, they would have taken us in three days. I’m not saying whose idea it was, but generally, our inner sense was right: If we sow chaos among people before the invasion, the Russians will devour us. Because during chaos, people flee the country. And that’s what happened when the invasion started — we were as strong as we could be. Some of our people left, but most of them stayed here, they fought for their homes. And as cynical as it may sound, those are the people who stopped everything. If that were to happen, in October — God forbid, during the heating season — there would be nothing left. Our government wouldn’t exist, that’s 100 percent sure.”

Although this argument can be controversial, it is certainly very different than “confessing that he didn’t warn the Ukrainian population to save his own government”. Seen in context, it is very clear that the words of Volodymyr Zelenskyy refer to the government Ukrainians chose to put in power through democratic elections instead of the puppet administration that Russia intended to install after the invasion, not to Zelenskyy’s own political faction, as this disinformation story disingenuously affirms.

See other examples of similar disinformation narratives in our database, such as claims that Zelenskyy gets military advice from his 9-year old son, that decisions on Ukraine are not made by Zelenskyy but by the high-ranking officials in the US, that Zelenskyy wants to cede Ukrainian territory to Poland, or that Zelenskyy is only a marketing operation, a Jewish face for a Nazi regime.