Hollywood star hasn’t donated $10 million to Ukraine, despite what news reports and internet posts allege
The story that Leonardo DiCaprio, the Hollywood actor, had given $10 million to Ukraine’s armed forces and was making international headlines has since been disproven. The actor did donate to humanitarian organisations in war-torn countries.
According to a story that originated on GSA News – an obscure Guyanese outlet – earlier this month, DiCaprio made the multimillion dollar donation “to support the war efforts as well as humanitarian efforts within the country”Because of his supposed Ukrainian family connections through his maternal grandmother.
Citation of the March 5th story “sources inside Ukraine today.”
This quickly became popular on social media. It was also echoed in Ukrinform by the Ukrainian state-owned news agency. Ukrinform stated explicitly that DiCaprio had given to charity “to the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”
This story, however, has been proved false. Some articles claimed that DiCaprio’s donation was handled by the International Visegrad Fund, a scholarship and grant foundation funded by the governments of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. CNN reported Wednesday on Wednesday from the Visegrad Foundation that they had confirmed no such donation.
A source “close to” DiCaprio also told CNN that the actor hadn’t handed the Ukrainian military any money, but that he had given undisclosed sums to CARE, the International Rescue Committee, Save the Children and the UN’s refugee agency. According to the source, DiCaprio did not have any family connections with Ukraine.
GSA News published a Sunday update that stated the site was up to date “would like to retract our story because it could not be verified.”Patrick Carpen, founder of GSA News, told CNN his first source was “a Facebook post from a Ukrainian woman whose posts about the war with Russia have generally been accurate.”
It is only one of many untrue or unverified stories that Ukraine has been telling since the beginning of the Russian offensive. Some of the most notable examples have been the multiple tellings and retellings of the ‘Ghost of Kiev’ tale, referring to a Ukrainian fighter pilot who supposedly scored a number of air-to-air kills against Russian jets. Even though the story has been shared many times by pro-Ukrainian media outlets, such as The Kyiv PostA fake posting identifying the pilot fooled a US Congressman, no proof of the Ghost’s existence has been put forward, and video footage that purportedly showed his exploits was later found to have been taken from a video game.
A similar story was told by 13 Ukrainian border patrols to a Russian warship. “go f**k”Before refusing surrender, the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had posthumously awarded the title to the guards. This story became international news after it became apparent that the Russians took the guards prisoner. Prior to the news being debunked the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zilensky had posthumously conferred the title on the guards “Hero of Ukraine.”
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