Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, an account on the Telegram messaging platform posing as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged his armed forces to surrender. Sebi said data, emails and other documents are being retrieved from the seized devices and detailed investigation is in progress. DFR Lab sent the image through Microsoft Azure's Face Verification program and found that it was "highly unlikely" that the person in the second photo was the same as the first woman. The fact-checker Logically AI also found the claim to be false. The woman, Olena Kurilo, was also captured in a video after the airstrike and shown to have the injuries. Multiple pro-Kremlin media figures circulated the post's false claims, including prominent Russian journalist Vladimir Soloviev and the state-controlled Russian outlet RT, according to the DFR Lab's report. After fleeing Russia, the brothers founded Telegram as a way to communicate outside the Kremlin's orbit. They now run it from Dubai, and Pavel Durov says it has more than 500 million monthly active users.
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