We came across the posts on the following topic on the social media platform X (1, 2, 3):
We came across multiple posts on the social media platform X suggesting that USAID had paid Hollywood celebrities millions of dollars to visit Ukraine and meet Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
The celebrities indicated to have been paid by USAID were listed as Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Orlando Bloom, Ben Stiller and Jean-Claude Van Damme, with Jolie stated to have received the largest amount from USAID.
Some posts were accompanied by various images of the celebrities meeting with Zelenskyy or with Ukrainian soldiers, while others were accompanied by a video clip of the meetings.
Text accompanying the video and some of the posts suggested that the allegedly funded trips were done to ‘increase Zelensky’s popularity among foreign audiences, particularly in the United States’, and that ‘the involvement of celebrities made it easier to coordinate funding programs for Ukraine during the conflict’.
Posts including the video have been reposted by prominent figures in US politics such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.
What is USAID?
USAID is the US government’s international humanitarian aid and development arm. It had been set up in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy to administer humanitarian aid programmes on behalf of the US government.
In 2023, USAID had a budget of more than $40 billion—less that 1% of the federal budget. It provided aid to over 130 countries, with conflict-hit and unstable countries such as Ukraine, Ethiopia, Congo, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Syria among the top recipients. Ukraine was the largest recipient of USAID funding in 2023.
Apart from undertaking regular responses to humanitarian crises around the world, USAID also works to support food security and global health, as well as combat climate change.
A Fabricated Video
A closer look at the trending video in the social media posts accusing USAID revealed that they carried the logo of E! News. E! News is a US-based news platform that focuses on news on the entertainment industry.
When we investigated the E! News website and its social media channels, we found no sign that the platform had posted the video. Moreover, the news articles posted were almost exclusively about the entertainment industry.
An online keyword search further revealed that an E! News spokesperson had confirmed to Reuters that the video was ‘not authentic and did not originate from E! News’.
Explaining the Trips
Since the emergence of the claims, they have been investigated by various major news and factchecking publications such as Reuters, Politifact, Lead Stories and AFP Factcheck.
While the publications have sought to verify the allegations with all the celebrities listed, comment has only been received, at present, from Stiller and Penn, whose attorney shared a joint statement affirming that the humanitarian travel to Ukraine was ‘entirely self-funded’.
Ben Stiller has also posted on X directly refuting the claims in the video, suggesting that the claims are ‘lies coming from Russian media’.
While comment from the other celebrities were not forthcoming, details of their visits were available in the Kyiv Post, an English-language Ukrainian news publication, which had conducted its own factcheck.
The Kyiv Post found that Jolie had visited Ukraine between April and May 2022 while serving as special envoy for the United Nations Refugee Agency, and that Bloom visited in March 2023 as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. Van Damme, meanwhile, was photographed alongside uniformed soldiers in Western Ukraine in December 2022, though the purpose and sponsorship of his trip remains unclear.
The Kyiv Post also indicated that UN guidelines for visits made as UN messengers and goodwill ambassadors did not carry any salary benefits, though they may be given travel and daily subsistence allowances when travelling on behalf of the UN.
AFP Factcheck also found no evidence of USAID payments to any of the celebrities on usaspending.gov, an official open data source compiling US federal spending information.
In contrast, investigations by media forensics experts quoted by AFP Factcheck and Politifact found that the fabricated E! video was likely to have been created by Russian disinformation networks.
The video had been traced to X accounts that regularly shared content as part of Russian disinformation campaigns, and it had also been shared early on by Pravda, a Russian state media publication.
The Storm-1516 narrative-laundering disinformation network where the fake video appeared had been identified as early as October 2024 attempting to influence American and western voters using actors, AI generation and faked primary sources as evidence for their claims. The claims are then ‘laundered’ using international news sources and influencers to reach their audience.
In October last year, the group had been assessed to have spread at least 54 disinformation narratives since August 2023.
Though basic inspection of the claims reveals the lack of veracity, they have managed to influence thought at the highest levels, such as when J.D. Vance repeated a Storm-1516 story, since debunked, that Ukrainian leaders were spending US aid money on yachts.
Famous Falsehoods
The lack of evidence to support the claims of the payments, along with their dubious origins, makes it clear that the claims contained within the video, that USAID paid celebrities to meet Zelenskyy in order to boost his popularity abroad, are false.
While this may appear to simply be a case of a relatively successful Russian disinformation campaign, this claim comes amid a backdrop of a flood of claims about USAID, many directly parroted by the US president Donald Trump and his advisors.
These claims include suggestions that USAID was providing grants to biased media outlets. These claims are inaccurate, with payments having been falsely attributed to USAID when they instead originated from other government agencies.
Payments made by government agencies—not USAID—for subscriptions to Politico, and contributions to the BBC’s charity arm, for example, have been perceived by commentators as evidence of profligate or corrupt spending.
USAID has emerged as a target for the Trump administration as he aims to cut government spending, and he has imposed a 90-day freeze on foreign aid since taking office on 20 January.
While it is not clear what the situation will be in the long term, the US’ status as the largest provider of humanitarian assistance globally means that there have already been ramifications around the world, with groups as varied as HIV patients in Sub-Saharan Africa and independent media outlets in Ukraine affected.
