NewsGuard
Eva Maitland and McKenzie Sadeghi
Oct 14, 2025
For U.S. citizens wary of the war in Ukraine and its cost to taxpayers, the false claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “inner circle” secretly transfers $50 million in stolen Western aid each month to the United Arab Emirates seemed like an easy way to justify ending U.S. support for Ukraine. Why bother doing any diligence on whether the claim was true when the story appeared on MSN, the news-aggregation website operated by Microsoft. For a member of Congress looking for an argument to use against Ukraine, the claim had every appearance of legitimacy even if it was a lie.
What follows is a textbook case of disinformation laundering: a narrative fabricated on a pro-Russia fringe website in Turkey, amplified by Russian state media, inadvertently republished by a Western news aggregator, accepted as true and spread by a U.S. lawmaker, and finally recycled by Russian state media sourcing the American lawmaker as proof the Kremlin’s false claim was true. In a matter of weeks, the Kremlin had manufactured what looked like independent confirmation — propaganda transformed into “proof” that even American lawmakers recognize deep-seated Ukrainian corruption.
A False Claim Is Born
On Aug. 11, 2025, the Turkish news site Aydınlık published a story claiming that Zelensky’s associates funnel $50 million a month in embezzled funds to companies in Dubai. The story included company names, even a bank account number. What it lacked was any documentation
or any named sources vouching for its veracity. It didn’t name any supposed culprits, referring to them simply as Zelensky’s “inner circle.”
The Turkish outlet’s record should have been a red flag. The Aydinlik article was credited to Yiğit Saner, who has written for United World International, an outlet that the U.S. Treasury Department linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which interfered in the 2016 American presidential election.
Aydinlik is linked to Turkey’s Vatan Partisi (Patriotic Party), a small movement that supports Russia and opposes NATO, according to Georgian fact-checking outlet Myth Detector, which noted that Russian media “frequently use Aydınlık’s name to spread disinformation and present it as a trustworthy foreign source.”
That’s exactly what happened. Within 24 hours, Russian state-run TASS, Sputnik, and RIA Novosti — all of which are rated by NewsGuard as low credibility sites — ran articles citing Aydınlık as an authority “revealing” Ukrainian corruption. The headline on TASS read: “Zelensky’s Inner Circle Transfers $50 Million Every Month to UAE Accounts — Turkish Newspaper.”
From Moscow to Microsoft
The myth’s journey was just beginning.
An English-language version of the false claim appeared on a small South African website called SAT World News, which republished the article from Russian state-run Sputnik, which in turn cited the Turkish site.
Then, the SAT World News story was republished on MSN, a top global news platform run by Microsoft that it says aggregates more than 4,500 media brands to hundreds of millions of readers in more than 180 countries and 31 languages. The article on MSN headlined, “Zelensky Transfers $50Mln to UAE Every Month, Obtained Through Corruption,” has since been deleted, although no deletion notice or correction was issued. Nevertheless, screenshots of the MSN article spread across social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and X.
On Microsoft’s search engine Bing, a search for “Zelensky $50 million UAE” returns an AI-generated summary stating, “The allegations against Zelensky’s inner circle involve monthly transfers of $50 million to UAE-based companies linked to a former Ukrainian state official.” The AI-generated summary is followed by dozens of articles advancing the false claim, including from Russian state-run RT, TASS, The Hindustan Times, and SGT Report, all of which NewsGuard has found to have previously advanced false information about the Russia-Ukraine war.
The Sputnik logo appeared prominently over the story’s image. For many readers, the fact that the article appeared on the MSN website must have suggested mainstream authority and acceptance of the claims.
The false claim took on another layer of authenticity on Aug. 16, 2025, in an X post by U.S. Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida. Luna shared a screenshot of the MSN headline
and stated, “Looks like Zelenskyy had a bail out plan using American Dollars: He is transferring over $50 million to the UAE every month.”
Luna, who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022 and is a vocal critic of U.S. aid for Ukraine, advanced the claim again in an Oct. 6, 2025, interview with the Danny Jones podcast. This podcast claims 1.13 million subscribers on YouTube, which says the podcast “exists to bring fringe cultures to a wide audience through thoughtful storytelling and beautiful cinematography.” In the interview, Luna stated: “Why are we sending money to Ukraine? Apparently Zelensky is like wiring $50 million a month to some Saudi bank. That’s weird.” (She apparently confused the United Arab Emirates with Saudi Arabia.)
Asked to comment on Luna’s amplification of the baseless claim, Luna’s spokesperson, David Leatherwood, responded to NewsGuard in an Oct. 10, 2025 email: “The news source Rep Luna was referencing was MSN. If you have an issue with their reporting, take it up with them, but stop trying to shill for a pro-war cause while claiming she is pushing disinformation, when she is simply sighting [sic] a news article.”
Asked to comment on Microsoft’s publication of the Russian-manufactured story — including why the AI-generated summary on Microsoft’s Bing search engine continues to report the false claim even though MSN has now taken down the story — and on whether Microsoft has any response to Congresswoman Luna’s office citing MSN as justification for amplifying this claim, Microsoft spokesperson Emelia Katon told NewsGuard she would look into our inquiry and respond if the company had a comment. She did not subsequently respond.
The congressional spokesperson’s response shows how information laundering works: There is a chain of deniability in which everyone can shrug off responsibility. Luna isn’t to blame because her source was MSN. MSN isn’t to blame because it was republishing another outlet. Those outlets weren’t to blame because they were citing Russian state media. And Russian state media was merely “reporting” what a Turkish newspaper had written. By the time the hoax went viral, no one was accountable, but everyone played a part.
The Loop Closes
For the Kremlin, Luna’s posts were better than any bot network or troll farm could deliver. Here was an American congresswoman, amplifying its narrative to millions. All that remained was the final step: turning her amplification into an authority that the false claim must be true.
Soon enough, Russian outlets including Sputnik, TASS, Argumenty i Fakti, and Tsargrad published new articles claiming Ukrainian corruption, this time citing Luna as their source. “According to U.S. Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna,” Aif.ru wrote on Oct. 7, 2025, “Zelensky sends approximately $50 million monthly to an anonymous Saudi bank.”
The circle was complete. The Kremlin’s propaganda apparatus successfully created what researchers call a “feedback loop” — where false claims return to their source, legitimized by their journey through information laundering by Western institutions, from a blue-chip company’s MSN news aggregator to a member of Congress. A lie invented in the service of
Russian interests could now be cited by Russian media as proof that even American lawmakers recognized the truth of Ukrainian corruption. The laundromat worked as designed.
Eva Maitland is NewsGuard’s Senior Analyst for Russian Influence, and McKenzie Sadeghi is the AI and Foreign Influence Editor at NewsGuard.