The BBC News report is fake, and the footage from Volodymyr Zelensky’s video address in which the stolen painting is allegedly visible, has been edited. In reality, a painting by a contemporary Ukrainian artist hangs in the president’s office.
A news segment bearing the BBC News logo is circulating online, claiming that just one month after the theft of Cézanne’s “Still Life with Cherries” from an Italian museum, the painting appeared in Volodymyr Zelensky’s office. The president allegedly published a video in which the stolen canvas is visible in the background, before hastily deleting it.
In reality, the BBC News segment is fake: the outlet did not produce this clip and did not report on the “story.” BBC representatives confirmed this in a comment to France 24 Observer, unequivocally calling the video a “fake.” The original footage used by propagandists to produce the forgery was published on Zelensky’s official YouTube channel as far back as January 19th. The address clearly shows an entirely different painting behind the president, a Crimean landscape by contemporary artist Andriy Chebotaru, a native of Sevastopol. “Yes, two of my paintings hang there: the first was painted before the annexation of Crimea. Where the cliffs are so red. Near Alushta there is a mountain massif called Demerdzhi and a village called Luchistoe. I painted that picture from that village. I think it was around 2012 or 2013,” the artist said in an interview with the outlet Hal-info. The artist does not even know how the canvases ended up in Zelensky’s collection; it is likely that the president’s team acquired them through intermediaries or received them as a gift.
The fabricated story is built around a real incident: in the early hours of March 22nd, four armed masked men robbed the villa of the Magnani Rocca Foundation near the Italian city of Parma, stealing three paintings with a combined value of approximately €9 million. The perpetrators forced their way through the main entrance and within minutes removed three masterpieces from the walls of the “French Room” on the building’s first floor: “Fish” by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, “Odalisque on the Terrace” by Henri Matisse, and “Still Life with Cherries” by Paul Cézanne — the painting that features in the fake story. The entire operation lasted no more than three minutes, with the museum’s security alarm being the only thing that stopped the robbers from stealing more. The criminals escaped by climbing over a fence. The most valuable of the stolen works is considered to be the Renoir, estimated at €6 million. The crime has already been described as one of the most significant art thefts in Italy recently, particularly against the backdrop of the high-profile robbery at the Louvre in Paris last October. The investigation is being conducted by the Italian Carabinieri together with the Cultural Heritage Protection Unit.
Russia regularly spreads disinformation narratives about Volodymyr Zelensky and his inner circle, allegedly engaging in excessive and immoral spending. Recently, for instance, we debunked a story claiming that Zelensky had purchased an estate formerly belonging to rapper and convicted sex offender P. Diddy.
