Does a viral picture of what looks like an Israeli passport confirm that Volodymyr Zelenskyy became an Israeli citizen before he became president of Ukraine? No, that's not true: The image got the spelling of his last name wrong. The machine-readable text on the bottom of the first page didn't fit the internationally standardized form, either.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on December 11, 2025. It opened:
Can someone explain this ?
The post showed what looked like an Israeli passport with a photo of Zelenskyy on it. This is what that image looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/JeffreyxEpstein)
The account on X that wondered about the explanation was marked as a parody account, but it was not the only one sharing the image.
On the same day, another account on X (archived here) posted the same image linking it to the purported findings during an earlier search of the apartment of Andriy Yermak, one of Zelenskyy's top advisors (archived here).
NABU, the Ukrainian anti-corruption agency that executed the search, never released the detailed description of the found items. As of this writing, its only comment (archived here) confirmed the fact there was a search, but nothing more.
The first sign of fakery in the image examined in this fact check was an incorrect spelling of the Ukrainian president's last name. On the English version of the official website of the Ukrainian president (archived here), Volodymyr Zelenskyy's last name is written with a double "y" at the end, but the "passport" missed one of them.
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of page at president.gov.ua)
The bottom part of the image shows what is called a machine-readable zone that contains information about the passport and its owner in an internationally recognized standardized form (archived here). This format is described on pages 17 through 20 of the International Civil Aviation Organization document that describes those requirements. Both lines show the nationality of the passport owner. This indicates the citizenship of the issuing country, not other citizenships if the passport's owner has any. The image circulating on social media, however, reads "4UKR" on the second line. An authentic document would have just repeated "ISR".
Volodymyr Zelenskyy became president in 2019. Ukraine allowed ordinary citizens to have multiple citizenships (archived here) in June 2025. However, neither in 2019 nor in 2025 were judges or public officials (archived here) permitted to have any other passport than a Ukrainian one. Had the media or contenders for a political office learned that a candidate had one or more additional citizenships, that could have cost the candidate a race. Lead Stories did not find credible reports of that being an issue during the 2019 presidential campaign.
The claim reviewed in this article fits the pattern of other false statements linked to Russian actors. In 2022, the social media accounts shared a claim that Zelenskyy was a Russian citizen. In 2023, a similar -- fake -- image was being shared as purported proof that his wife, Olena Zelenska, received an Israeli passport (archived here).
