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Billionaire-turned-U.S. “special government employee” Elon Musk shared a fake video on his X (Twitter) account that falsely claimed U.S. taxpayer money was used to finance visits by celebrities to Ukraine. The video, likely linked to the Russian disinformation network “Matryoshka,” alleged that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded these trips in an effort to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The video, styled as a report from media company E! News, falsely claimed that several Hollywood stars were paid large sums for their visits to Ukraine: Angelina Jolie ($20 million), Orlando Bloom ($8 million), Ben Stiller ($4 million), and Jean-Claude Van Damme ($1.5 million)
Ben Stiller quickly responded to the allegation, saying his humanitarian trip to Ukraine was “completely self-funded” and that he had received no support from USAID. Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, also drew attention to the fact that no such content had ever been published by E! News.
E! News, for its part, told AFP that the video “is not authentic and did not originate from E! News.”
As summarized by the Kyiv Post, Jolie traveled to Ukraine between April and May 2022 while serving as a special envoy for the UN refugee agency. Penn made multiple personal visits, meeting with Zelensky as part of his work on the documentary “Superpower,” which he released in 2023 — the film was available for free on the Paramount+ YouTube channel.
Bloom visited Zelensky in March 2023 in his role as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. Van Damme was seen in western Ukraine in December 2022, posing for photos with soldiers in uniform, though the purpose of his visit and any potential sponsorship remained unclear.
Despite these facts, Musk did not remove the false content from his X page until well after a community note was added under his post, highlighting that while the video mimicked the E! News style, there was no evidence the media company had ever published such a report.
In December, a new disinformation campaign linked to Russia's “Matryoshka” network was discovered on the Bluesky social media platform after the Kremlin-linked initiative had already been exposed on X.
The new campaign featured six fake videos that followed a similar pattern. Each disinformation video began with a real person — a professor, a student from a top university, or a recognized expert — introducing themselves and beginning to speak on a topic unrelated to Russia’s war in Ukraine. The footage then transitioned to segments that did not show the speaker on screen while a computer-generated voiceover continued narrating. In these moments, the speaker seemed to promote claims that the West should end its support for Ukraine, that Europe should align its future with Russia, and that Volodymyr Zelensky is a dictator — or even a vampire.