The video has been viewed millions of times. It shows Bill Gates, seated on an armchair and declaring, facing the camera, that “the Ukrainian government is one of the worst in the world, corrupt, controlled by a few rich people”, which makes several Internet users say that the Microsoft co-founder violently charges Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But in reality the video was truncated.
.@ZelenskyyUa isn’t going to like this. pic.twitter.com/ar4Q336V3T
— Australians vs. The Agenda (@ausvstheagenda) January 24, 2023
Bill Gates did not specifically target Volodymyr Zelensky
This is an excerpt from an interview given by Bill Gates to the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank, at the end of January 2023. At the 27th minute, the American billionaire pronounces this sentence well but he also says “before the war”. It therefore does not directly target Volodymyr Zelensky and his government, but talks about political power in Ukraine before the conflict with Russia, and in general.
This truncated video was first shared on the Twitter account “Australians versus the Agenda”, in other words “Australians against the system”. An account created in December 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, and which disseminates several conspiracy theories on Covid-19, in particular the very widespread theory according to which Bill Gates would have manufactured the epidemic in order to then be able to sell vaccines. This misleading snippet is simply a new way to fuel false information about him.
Incidentally, below another post of the video which has been viewed over two million times, Twitter puts a warning message specifying that the images were cut.
The fight against corruption relaunched in Ukraine
On the merits, Bill Gates refers to a phenomenon known for a long time and already widely relayed by international observers. In 2022, the NGO Transparency International, which fights against corruption in governments and governmental institutions, ranked Ukraine only 121st out of 180 in its annual report on the perception of corruption in countries, therefore closer to the bottom of the table than the top.
The fight against corruption was also one of Volodymyr Zelensky’s campaign arguments, before his election in 2019, even if, subsequently, he was not always convinced on the subject: he both supported the creation of the High Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine, decided by his predecessor, but in parallel, he was pinned himself in the Pandora Papers case in 2021. The vast investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists pinned several world leaders for offshore financial arrangements and the Ukrainian president was one of them, because he had shares in a shell company registered in a tax haven.
Pushed by his Western allies in the war against Russia, including the United States, which conditions its aid to the fight against corruption, Volodymyr Zelensky has finally launched a kind of clean hands operation in recent weeks. Several politicians have been sacked.