‘Zebrac’ Zelenski
For years the president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenski has been the central figure of the Kremel propaganda, both in state tv channels and through bot networks on X controlled by Russian authorities. In the fall of 2023, these propaganda efforts focused on Zelenski's visit to the US, where the leader of a nation attacked by Russia provided himself military and financial assistance on a large scale. In response, the Kremlovian propaganda launched a run depicting Zelenski as a “sneaker” desperately pleading for “malms” from Washington. Trolls, propaganda, and even diplomats were active in the campaign.
On October 2, 2023, Elon Musk published a revision of a well-known meme depicting a teenager with a tense expression, with an image of Zelenski. In the version of Musk's version, the signature was: “When it was 5 minutes ago, and you didn't ask for a billion dollars in aid.”
The Kremlin was delighted with this success. The Dossier investigative portal reached the minutes from a weekly gathering of the Russian presidential administration, attended by contractors from the Social Engineering Agency. The study from the meeting, which took place 3 days after Musk published the tweet, contained a memo on it.
“Mem Muska — created by Sofia. Fake. ” Sofia Zacharowa, a associate of the Directorate for Information and Communication Technology in the Presidential Administrative Directorate, oversees contractors from the Agency for Social Engineering, headed by Ilia Gambashida. The Agency runs a fresh "troll factory" which has replaced the no longer existing network of the late founder of Wagner Group, Evgeny Prigozyn.
The Russian presidential administration continued its efforts to spread disinformation on this subject. After they failed to get another retweet from Musk, they simply fabricated it, starting a run with a fake.
“Dictatorship” by Zelenski
Russian media and the Kremlin-supported "political analysts" have been calling Zelenski a dictator since 2019, and accusations have intensified after Russia launched a full-scale invasion — which prevented Ukraine from holding scheduled elections. Revocation of election during active armed conflict is simply a standard practice in the world, but Russian propaganda utilized this widely accepted decision of the Kiev authorities as an excuse to claim the illegality of Zelenski. The communicative about the “Dictator of Zelenski” has thus become the basis for propaganda tv broadcasts.
Following Russia's example, this argument was shortly repeated by Republicans in the US — from tv propaganda by Tucker Carlson and conspiracy theorist Tulsa Gabbard (who later became manager of national intelligence) to president Donald Trump (who later stated that “he could not believe that he called Zelenski a dictator”).
Elon Musk besides joined, tweeting February 19: “Zelenski cannot claim to represent the will of the Ukrainian people until he restores freedom of the press and stops canceling elections!” The billionaire himself later called the Zelenski dictator.
Public debt of the United States
U.S. public debt has long been a favourite subject of Russian state tv propaganda — and Vladimir Putin himself. He argues that the issue is "traceable" (which is evidently not true) or that the debt is based solely on trust. Russian propaganda channels spent years counting down to the imminent insolvency of the United States, and Vladimir Solov's broadcasts routinely discuss how American public debt allegedly undermines the full global economy. The tradition of predicting the insolvency of the United States dates back to russian times, and despite Russia itself having been through insolvency and many financial crises since then, predictions about the US strategy proceed with remarkable regularity.
The public debt of the United States is indeed a subject of discussion among economists and politicians, even if there is inactive no real threat of insolvency and despite the fact that this issue is of secondary political importance. However, following Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk abruptly began to comment on national debt and budget deficit in his function as de facto head of the Government's Department of Efficiency (DOGE), a quasi-official entity that was created specifically for him.
Musk stated that the fight against national debt — something Russian propaganda has complained about for years — is his main priority. To this end, he importantly reduced backing for technological programmes, completely closing down any of them, while at the same time firing abroad aid workers and institutions promoting democracy that have been operating in the US for decades. He considered the budgets of most national agencies and departments to be "a waste" of expenditure.
As reported by The Insider, Russian media concerns about US public debt became much more common after the invasion of Ukraine. However, Musk himself did not rise the issue publically — or many others — until the end of 2024. Now much of his posts on X are devoted to public debt. Since the beginning of 2025 he has written about it at least 140 times — more than in the full erstwhile year (and before that the subject had never appeared on his social media).
Zero percent budget savings
Musk wrote that “the holding of a national debt at the planet war level without conducting a planet war is disastrous, ” and promised that DOGE would fight what he called “the crazy level of waste and fraud.”
The first DOGE results reports were published on 18 February (the department promised to print them by 14 February but failed to meet the deadline). In 40% of contracts cancelled by the agency Muska budget savings were precisely zero dollars., whereas overall savings data were greatly inflated.
DOGE website initially claimed that costs were reduced by $55 billion (PLN 210.7 billion), but this figure was later quietly adjusted to $15 billion (PLN 56.4 billion). In many cases, the reported figures stay inaccurate — for example, due to the fact that the authoritative analysis did not include services that have already been made and paid, or due to the fact that the first amount of the contract was given without confirmation that it was later reduced.
Donald Trump promised to reduce public debt during his first term. However, as calculated by ProPublica, the debt actually increased by 8.4 trillion dollars. (more than PLN 32 trillion) during the first 4 years of his office in the Oval Office — not mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but mostly due to the taxation cuts and employment laws in Trump's first administration.
Conspiracy theories
The conspiracy explanation that the U.S. elections are rigged with electronic voting machines appeared after Trump's defeat in 2020 and was repeatedly overturned by authoritative and journalistic investigations (the Fox News station even had to pay over 700 million dollars as part of a settlement for spreading false claims on the subject). By 2024, this communicative seemed mostly forgotten, but as the fresh electoral cycle approached, Russian propaganda revived it. It was not only tv propaganda that promoted the explanation that the vote counting in the US was unbelievable. A spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of abroad Affairs Maria Zacharowa even published a post on alleged horror films related to “the voting machines”.
Beginning in mid-2024 and ending in November elections, Musk actively promoted this old conspiracy explanation — right next to Russian propaganda. Thanks to the algorithms of company X, which Musk has owned since 2022, his claims that electronic voting is unbelievable, reached hundreds of millions of people.
In addition, since the end of 2023. Musk spread another conspiracy theory: that undocumented immigrants voted in the U.S. elections and that they would inevitably unite against the Republican Party. According to Musko, a associate of legislature told him that they were "intendedly imported as future left-wing voters". He claimed that cards were utilized for correspondence voting to facilitate this process.
According to The Insider analysis, Musk mentioned these 2 conspiracy theories in his posts on X at least 400 times since January 2024. Despite their earlier existence, they showed no interest before the end of 2023.
Russian propagandists were eager to capture Musko’s claims. Reports of a distant vote in the US were aired in Russia 24, where Musk was cited as an expert. Russian Senator Alexey Pushkov spoke of electoral fraud involving migrants. NTV stated that Kamala Harris could only win if she received aid from undocumented immigrants. 1 of the segments, entitled ‘A Chorus of Fake Votes’, even quoted Muska as an expert on American electoral law.
The Center against Digital hatred (CDH) estimated that misleading posts by Musk on X regarding elections were read at least 1.2 billion times. Meanwhile, according to Insider's calculations, all Muska posts related to the election since the beginning of 2024 have accumulated at least 7.3 billion views, over 47 million likes and 2.8 million responses.
Coronavirus funded by USAID
For a fewer years Russian propaganda repeatedly pushed the false claim that the COVID-19 virus was created utilizing funds from the U.S. global improvement Agency (USAID). The Russian Ministry of Defence organised many conferences on this subject and published many material accusing USAID of backing the improvement of biological weapons — peculiarly in Ukraine.
In August 2022 the head of the Russian Radio Defence Force, Chemical and Biological, Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, stated: "We are considering the anticipation that the USAID was active in the emergence of a fresh coronavirus. Since 2009, the agency has financed the foretell program, which has investigated fresh types of coronaviruses and included the capture of bats, known carriers of these viruses. 1 of the project's contractors was Metabiota, a company known for its military-biological activities in Ukraine... The way the COVID-19 script developed and the USAID's abrupt conclusion of the foretell programme in 2019 propose that the pandemic was intended and that the United States was active in its formation.
When the Russian Ministry of abroad Affairs summed up this "report" on Twitter, the account was blocked. The ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zacharowa, referred to the censorship platform's activities.
In February 2025. Elon Musk abruptly became curious in the subject and declared war on the USAID. He came across a mention to the program "PREDICT" on an anonymous X account, which sells money-making courses through the platform and republished its content, adding, "Do you know that the USAID, utilizing your taxes, funded investigation into biological weapons, including COVID-19, which killed millions of people?".
United States sponsoring terrorism
In February 2025, Elon Musk began his crusade against the USAID. He never mentioned this agency in any context before. Billionaire accused the U.S.ID of wasting taxpayers’ money, spreading “left propaganda” and exerting political influence in various countries — about the same rhetoric Russian politicians, officials, and propagandaists utilized to describe the agency over the last decade.
In 2019, the Russian Ministry of abroad Affairs stated: “A voice from the past — the Cold War era — sounded in Washington, D.C. erstwhile the head of the American global improvement Agency (USAID) Mark Green spoke... The USAID does not aim to advance global cooperation; it is simply a tool for ideological combat and propaganda."
In 2024, Russian legislature Andrei Lugovov said in Vladimir Solovyov's programme: "About 100 media operating in friendly republics have been identified as being engaged exclusively in anti-Russian propaganda on behalf of the West to make centres of influence". Lugowogo, who was allegedly accused of poisoning polonium Alexander Litvinenko in 2006, concluded that Russia should make its own agency to influence politics in another countries.
For Russian propaganda logo USAID became evidence of the "destructive influence of America" in Ukraine. In February 2023, during the Vesti program, a man presented as an officer of the Russian National defender showed pamphlets printed with support of the USAID. He described publications on the improvement of agriculture as "a propaganda lettering aimed at inciting hatred of everything Russian".
By 2024 Putin even went to accuse the United States of financing terrorists in the North Caucasus in the early 21st century. Putin's statements may have been a form of "projection", given that Russia actually financed terrorist attacks against the US under his leadership.
Shortly after Putin, Elon Musk besides accused the United States of financing terrorism through USAID, quoting as ‘proof’ a photograph of the ISIS militant in a shelter with the agency logo. A photograph of militants in a shelter with the USAID logo was distributed by American far-right bloggers since 2013, after conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck first published them. However, his own portal, The Blaze, later reported that the photograph was taken after ISIS militants in Syria seized supplies of humanitarian aid and weapons that the US provided to the Syrian opposition.
Musk besides distributed a screenshot of the alleged financial table, which in his opinion shows that the USAID donated over $1 164 million to “terrorist-related organisations”. His post on social media accompanying the photograph asked rhetorically: “How have many people said why pay terrorist organizations and any countries to hatred us if they are willing to do it for free?”
In fact, most of the funds listed in the table were allocated to American close East exile Aid (ANERA), a charity that has 1 of the highest assurance rates among American NGOs. another organisations listed in the table besides supply support to refugees, women and people affected by armed conflicts — not terrorists. Moreover, the sum of $164 million does not come exclusively from the USAID (but at this point specified details do not substance much).
Musk besides helped a Russian network of disinformation channels called Matrioszka, which is associated with Russian intelligence services. He retweeted a video disseminating a false claim that the USAID paid celebrities to travel to Ukraine.
Thanks to his efforts, the video has accumulated tens of millions of views — this is simply a evidence for Matrioška's campaign. In addition to Muska, anonymously far-right accounts that gained popularity on X in fresh years, besides began to reenforce the popularity of the video and its claims.
