World News for Students of English

28-04-2026 15:00

Online posts recently claimed that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy displays a stolen French painting in his office. These posts included a video that looked like a report from the BBC.

The video suggested that a famous work by Paul Cézanne, stolen in Italy in March, was hanging on the wall during an interview. However, fact-checkers quickly proved that this allegation is false. The video is a fake report created with AI and digital editing. Experts compared the footage to an original interview from three months ago and found that the painting was different.

The real paintings in the office belong to a Ukrainian artist named Andrii Chebotaru. He confirmed that the artwork depicts a landscape from his home region in Crimea, not a stolen French masterpiece. This incident is part of a disinformation campaign coordinated by Russia. Such operations use fake news to spread negative stories about Ukraine and its leaders. Similar false claims appeared in the past, such as stories about Ukrainian refugees in France. These campaigns aim to confuse the public by using manipulated media and artificial voices to look authentic.

Difficult words: fact-checker (a person or group who checks if a story is true or a lie), allegation (a statement that someone does something wrong, but which hasn’t been proved), authentic (real or true).

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