FAKE: The West must pay for the disposal of “obsolete equipment” provided to Ukraine — Zelenskyi

Information is being spread online claiming that President Volodymyr Zelenskyi stated during a national TV marathon broadcast that the West must pay for the disposal of “obsolete equipment” provided to Ukraine. The post includes the following alleged quote from him: “We are not a scrapyard for your metal!” The authors of the post also claim that Ukraine is preparing a draft law that, among other things, envisions the disposal of Javelins and the dismantling of M60 tanks.

However, this is a fake. The information is completely fabricated. Zelenskyi did not say this, and there is no such draft law on the Verkhovna Rada website. The media have also not reported any such statement by the President of Ukraine.

A search for the quote attributed to Zelenskyi in the post yielded no results. There is no draft law on the Verkhovna Rada website that provides for the disposal of outdated Western equipment. Zelenskyi’s official social media pages also contain no information about such an initiative.

Although the authors of the post claimed that Zelenskyi’s “statement” allegedly caused panic in Brussels and Washington, there are no mentions of this in any credible Western or Ukrainian media outlets. This information was first published by a user with the nickname Eternity on a blog on the Polish portal Salon24. Notably, the author did not cite a source for the news or provide any links. In other publications, Eternity has also spread narratives aligned with Russian ones, for example, referring to the Russian-Ukrainian war as a “proxy war”.

The text contains absurd and illogical excerpts. For instance, it claims that Ukrainian farmers are turning German tanks into flowerbeds. It also attributes to Zelenskyi the bizarre statement that instructions for artillery systems are written in Latin. This seems strange — why would the instructions supposedly be written in a language long out of general use, and not in the national languages of the countries that manufacture the weapons?

Propagandists deliberately spread this fake to portray Ukrainians as “ungrateful” for the aid they have received. The authors of the disinformation likely intended that the message, published in Polish, would provoke outrage among Poles, ultimately leading to reduced support for Kyiv.