The story was debunked, but not before it went viral last year: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a video masquerading as a legitimate media report claimed, had bought his mother a $3.2 million Armani-designed apartment in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world’s tallest building.
As it racked up millions of views and spread on social media, the report was found to be false — but the question of who was behind it was trickier. Now, leaked documents examined by Schemes, the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service, link the disinformation campaign to the Social Design Agency, a Western-sanctioned Russian outfit with close ties to the Kremlin.
The voluminous leak comes from a corporate communications platform used by employees of both the Kremlin and the Social Design Agency, which the United States described in 2024 as a “key actor” in a “persistent foreign malign influence campaign” conducted at the direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration.
Obtained by the news outlet Delfi Estonia and shared with Schemes and other media organizations, the documents include screenshots of private correspondence and internal reports on projects at various stages of planning or implementation.
The cache displays the broad scale of the Social Design Agency’s divisive acts and influence campaigns in Europe and elsewhere, including vandalism in Germany and France, interference in elections in Armenia, and the spread of pro-Russian narratives through opinion leaders in Western countries.
The leaked material includes an internal report that documents the effort to discredit Zelenskyy with the claim he had purchased luxury real estate abroad while Ukraine’s economy struggles amid Russia’s full-scale invasion, which Putin launched in 2022 and which includes relentless attacks on infrastructure.
Rescuers work at an apartment building partially destroyed in Russian air strikes on Kyiv on May 14.
Metadata indicates that the report was created on June 9, 2025, a few days after the Burj Khalifa fake first appeared on social media.
The centerpiece of the campaign was a video that was passed off as a story from the Saudi-based network Al Arabiya. The internal report estimates that that the material about Zelenskyy could have reached 86 million views globally, including 21 million among the English-speaking audience — numbers that could not be independently verified. It also mentions that the Center for Countering Disinformation, part of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine eventually debunked the claim.
‘Foreign Bloggers With An Audience Of Millions’
The internal report, titled REFERENCE.MEDIA CASE.BURJ KHALIFA, also documented the spread of the false claim, stating that 19 “project contractors” shared it abroad, resulting in more than 10 million views.
It does not name the contractors, but it contains information about “large foreign bloggers with an audience of millions” who distributed the fake video about Zelenskyy “after the publication of the case materials began.” The false report started to spread through Russian Telegram channels on June 5, 2025, and the research group Vox Ukraine determined that it was uploaded to the Internet on June 4.
A general view of the Dubai skyline with the Burj Khalifa skyscraper at its center.
Accounts that shared the video include that of Jim Ferguson, a British politician who ran unsuccessfully for a Parliament seat with the Brexit Party in 2019. His June 5, 2025 post, which has garnered about 2 million views and has not been taken down, states: “While Ukrainians suffer under war and rationing, Zelensky quietly gifted his mother a $3.2M apartment in the Burj Khalifa — 11th floor, Armani Residences.”
Ferguson did not reply to a request for comment from Schemes.
A post about the report also remains on the feed of the X account Concerned Citizen, where it has garnered about 1.5 million views.
In September 2024, Schemes reported on a leak of records that revealed details of efforts by the Social Design Agency to discredit Ukraine and Western governments.
In a court document filed that same month, the US government accused the Social Design Agency and other Russian companies of using “domains impersonating legitimate news entities” and other methods “to covertly spread Russian government propaganda.”
It said this effort had been carried out since at least 2022 “under the direction and control” of Putin’s administration and “in particular” Sergei Kiriyenko, a senior Kremlin official and who has been a first deputy chief of his administration for a decade.
The US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on the Social Design Agency in March 2024, and the European Union and the United Kingdom have also done so.
Beyond the Burj Khalifa claim, the leaked records pointed to Social Design Agency’s involvement in a slew of actions that appeared to be hate crimes, including an incident in which pigs’ heads were left in front of nine Paris mosques.
One leaked document revealed an apparent agency plan to influence the Armenian parliamentary elections on June 7, which come in the midst of an effort by incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s government to pull the South Caucasus country further from Moscow’s orbit and tighten ties with the West.