Land documents claiming Ukrainian officials bought fancy properties in Switzerland are forged

Did top Ukrainian officials spend lavishly on fancy homes in Switzerland as Ukraine received billions of U.S. dollars to help defend itself in a war with Russia? 

No, and documents that supposedly support this claim are forgeries, a Swiss official said. 

A headline from Newspunch, a site that has spread misinformation in the past, states: "High-ranking Ukrainian officials caught splurging on luxury real estate in Switzerland." 

The headline spread to Facebook, and was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Facebook.)

The article said its claims are based on a "fact-checked" Newspunch investigation. It links to tweets from @AZMilitary1, which has previously spread misleading information about Finland’s ties to Nazis and other topics.

Newspunch’s article and the related tweets claim to show Swiss land registry documents and allege that three people who have ties to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy purchased multimillion dollar properties in Gstaad, a Swiss resort town. The officials named are Dmitry Razumkov, a politician, Oleksandr Danyliuk, a former National Security and Defense Council secretary, and Lyudmila Denisova, a former human-rights official. Denisova has since said that her firing was initiated by Zelenskyy. 

But the documents are fake. The Land Registry Oberland in Bern, Switzerland, keeps records about properties in Gstaad. Adrian Mühlematter, the Land Registry Oberland’s managing land registry administrator, told PolitiFact that the documents about the Ukrainian officials were forgeries. 

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Mühlematter sent us an article from the Swiss German-language newspaper Berner Zeitung that said the claim began with a blogger loyal to the Kremlin, who tweets in German under the alias Gagarin. A Berner Zeitung reporter discovered that the documents were forged because they contain inconsistencies, including land registry property numbers that do not match the addresses and identifying numbers that have insufficient digits.

The documents also claim to be the first page of a five-page document. But Mühlematter said that typically only agricultural properties, because of listed easements, have documents that long. 

Newspunch’s article used the fake documents to try to convince readers that Ukraine’s government is corrupt and therefore undeserving of foreign aid. The article said: "Did anybody stop to think that sending billions of dollars in no-strings-attached aid to one of Europe’s poorest countries — that also happens to be one of the world’s most corrupt countries — might be a poor use of U.S. taxpayer funds?"

However, the article also said there is "no evidence" that U.S. funds were used to purchase these Swiss properties.  

PolitiFact asked Newspunch for evidence to support its claims but received none. 

A website claimed that three high-ranking Ukrainian officials had purchased luxury property in the resort town of Gstaad, Switzerland.

A Swiss land registry official said the documents cited as evidence were forged; errors in them prove that they did not come from the registry, the official said. 

We rate this claim False.