The story was debunked, but not before it went viral last year: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a video masquerading as a legitimate media report claimed, had bought his mother a $3.2 million Armani-designed apartment in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world’s tallest building.As it racked up millions of views and spread on social media, the report was found to be false -- but the question of who was behind it was trickier. Now, leaked documents examined by Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service, link the disinformation campaign to the Social Design Agency, a Western-sanctioned Russian outfit with close ties to the Kremlin.
The voluminous leak comes from a corporate communications platform used by employees of both the Kremlin and the Social Design Agency, which the United States described in 2024 as a “key actor” in a “persistent foreign malign influence campaign” conducted at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration.Obtained by the news outlet Delfi Estonia and shared with Schemes and other media organizations, the documents include screenshots of private correspondence and internal reports on projects at various stages of planning or implementation.The cache displays the broad scale of the Social Design Agency’s divisive acts and influence campaigns in Europe and elsewhere, including vandalism in Germany and France, interference in elections in Armenia, and the spread of pro-Russian narratives through opinion leaders in Western countries.The leaked material includes an internal report that documents the effort to discredit Zelenskyy with the claim he had purchased luxury real estate abroad while Ukraine’s economy struggles amid Russia’s full-scale invasion, which Putin launched in 2022 and which includes relentless attacks on infrastructure.
