“Bakhmut was unprofitable and subsidy-dependent.” Fake quote attributed to Zelensky on Armenian platform of Facebook

Last weekend, a photo collage was circulated in the Armenian-language platform of Facebook, in which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky allegedly declared that anyhow Bakhmut was unprofitable and subsidy-dependent (“Бахмут всё раво был убыточный и дотационный”). Here is why the content of the shared photo is fake.

Background: Official Moscow announced the other day that Russian troops captured the city of Bakhmut in Eastern Ukraine after long battles. Meanwhile, Kiev claims that the city has not completely come under the control of the Russians.

On May 21, a number of Facebook users, in particular Karen Kocharyan, who introduces himself as a political technologist, shared on his Facebook page a photo collage shared by a user named Sergey Hambardzumyan, with a note that the President of Ukraine Zelensky stated: “Anyhow Bakhmut was unprofitable and subsidy-dependent.”

The photo shared by Sergey Hambardzumyan and its caption, “The same story, Zelensky and Nikol turned out to be monkeys”, has been widely shared on social networks. Obviously, a parallel is drawn between the speech attributed to Zelensky and the statement made by Nikol Pashinyan after the 44-day war.

Sargis Ter-Yesayan, president of the human rights non-governmental organization “Rule of Law and Values”, wrote: “Bakhmut was a sad and unhappy city. Don’t you relate? The beloved leader of the sorosians, of the Sasna Tsrer, gave an assessment to Bakhmut with thousands of victims. This is the result of bringing drug addicts to power.”

In fact, the information in the caption shared with the photo taken back in the spring of 2022 is fake. There is no source that would confirm the authenticity of the words attributed to the President of Ukraine.

On May 21, journalists asked Volodymyr Zelensky at the G7 summit in Hiroshima whether Bakhmut is still under the control of the Ukrainian army, to which Zelensky replied: “I think not. But you have to understand that there is nothing there, they destroyed everything, there are no buildings. Unfortunately, this is a tragedy. Bakhmut exists only in our hearts. Everything has been leveled to the ground there. Only the land and a large number of dead Russians. Our defenders have done a great job and we are grateful to them.”

Thus, the quote attributed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Bakhmut was “unprofitable and subsidy-dependent” is fake.