Fact-check: Did Zelenskyy order ethnic Russians to move from Ukraine to Russia?

On July 16, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov chaired a United Nations Security Council meeting on multilateral cooperation.

Speaking before the 15-member Council, which Russia presides over during the month of July, Lavrov repeated the Kremlin’s invalid talking points trying to justify a decade-long campaign of Russian aggression that has killed scores of civilians and devastated Ukraine.

The Kremlin claims, falsely, that Russia occupies those parts of Ukraine where ethnically Russian Ukrainians align with the Russian state culturally and ideologically.

Russia’s top diplomat called Zelenskyy “racist” and accused the government in Kyiv of discriminating against ethnic Russians.

“[I]n 2021, V.A. Zelensky, in one of his interviews, ordered those who feel connected to the Russian culture to get out [of Ukraine] to Russia for the sake of the future of their children and grandchildren,” Lavrov said.

Lavrov falsified Zelenskyy’s statement.

The Russian foreign minister seems to be referring to an August 2021 Zelenskyy interview with Dom TV, a Ukrainian state television channel broadcasting in Russian language to the partially Russian-occupied territories of Donbas and Crimea.

During that interview, Zelenskyy responded to the Kremlin’s claims saying, “the people who live in the territory of the occupied Donbas and Crimea must understand clearly: this is not that someone kicking somebody out.

“I would like to be clear: Once again — either [Ukraine] is your Motherland, or you are a guest,” he added, speaking in Russian. “I consider it a big mistake to remain in Donbas if you live in the temporarily occupied territory and believe ‘our cause is righteous, we should be in Russia, we are Russians.’ This will never be a Russian territory. Never, as simple as that.”

Since that 2021 interview, Lavrov has been propagating a twisted version of Zelenskyy’s words to discredit Ukraine and its leadership.

For example, on January 14, 2022, during a press conference in Moscow, Lavrov said: “Recently, President Zelenskyy … stated that if the ‘individuals,’ being citizens of Ukraine, consider themselves Russian, want to speak Russian, profess Russian culture, then they must ‘move’ to Russia.”

Lavrov continued pushing the same disinformation during foreign diplomatic tours and in interviews with the news media, including in Turkey and his voyage across the African nations, and again in his speech at the United Nations.

Hundreds of Russian diplomatic missions worldwide and Russian-state-owned news media amplify Lavrov’s falsification of Zelenskyy’s words through their multi-language social media accounts, promoting the Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation.