Details of the Trump-Zelenskyy meeting at the UN General Assembly in New York were reported on ONT on September 24. The segment claimed that the U.S. president gave his Ukrainian counterpart only seven minutes:
“By the way, about Ukraine. Another meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy. This time on the sidelines of the General Assembly — at Kyiv’s request. It was brief, only seven minutes. One of the topics was the security guarantees that Kyiv is seeking.”
The press briefing before the meeting lasted about seven minutes. The talks themselves, according to media reports, went on for about an hour. That was reported by Russia’s Gazeta.ru, Deutsche Welle and ONT’s own website, citing Russia’s Izvestia.
Another fake about Volodymyr Zelenskyy was voiced on September 25 by Ryhor Azaronak in his livestream “Azaronak. Directly.” He called Ukrainian media “pathetic, stupid disgraces” and accused them of faking the video of the president’s speech at the UN General Assembly:
“And they even drew in — we can look at the pictures — they drew in people later with the help of AI, as if the whole world community was sitting there listening. Here’s the real photo: you can see that more than half the hall is empty, and you can count on your fingers the number of people listening. And here’s the next photo, the one they made on UNIAN with an AI tool.”
At that point, they showed a video clip from the hall where Volodymyr Zelenskyy spoke. In it, all the seats are filled.
An Irish journalist living in Moscow, Chay Bowes, posted a similar claim on X.
“Ukrainian state television ‘filled’ the half-empty UN hall for the speech of the drug führer in New York.”
In the video shown by Ryhor Azaronak, the logo of the TV channel he borrowed it from was blurred. On Bowes’ page, the logos of the Ukrainian channel 1+1 and the United News telethon are visible.
The WTF team found the livestream of Zelenskyy’s speech from the telethon on September 24. The video has the same channel logos and the same assembly hall, only it looks different: there are many empty seats. On September 25, the telethon showed Zelenskyy’s speech again, and the hall still had empty seats.
