It’s All a Blur: A Fuzzy Video Is Cited to Falsely Claim that European Leaders Snorted Cocaine on Their Way to Kyiv
By McKenzie Sadeghi and Eva Maitland
What happened: A low-resolution video supposedly showing French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer with a bag of cocaine and a coke spoon on a train ride to Kyiv spread widely among pro-Kremlin and far-right sources, in an apparent attempt to smear European leaders supporting Ukraine.
Context: On May 9, the three leaders, along with Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, traveled by train from Poland to Kyiv to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to discuss continued aid to Ukraine.
A closer look: In the days following the meeting, Russian state media and far-right accounts circulated a low-resolution video of the leaders on the train and claimed that it showed Macron, Starmer, and Merz using cocaine. These sources claimed that Macron hid a bag of cocaine and that Merz concealed a coke spoon as photographers entered the train car. (Tusk does not appear in the video.)
You can watch the video here:
The claim was shared widely in Russian media, including by Russian state news outlets RIA Novosti (Trust Score: 12.5/100) and RT (Trust Score: 7.5/100), Moscow-based newspaper Eurasia Daily (Trust Score: 12.5/100), and the Pravda network of approximately 150 news sites (Trust Score: 7.5/100), which published at least 102 articles advancing the claim.
The claim was also shared by multiple Russian officials and prominent pro-Kremlin commentators, including Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova, editor-in-chief of RT Margarita Simonyan, and former UN weapons inspector and pro-Kremlin commentator Scott Ritter.
U.S. conservative sites that NewsGuard has found to repeatedly publish false information, including American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars (Trust Score: 7.5/100), The Gateway Pundit (Trust Score: 30/100), USSA News (Trust Score: 0/100), and Survive the News (Trust Score: 0/100), also published articles making the false claim.
Actually: Original high-resolution videos and photos of the train meeting published by outlets including the Agence France-Presse (Trust Score: 100/100) and The Associated Press (Trust Score: 100/100) show that the white object said to be cocaine is actually a white napkin, and the spoon is a cocktail pick.
Vanguard Intel Group, a U.S.-based security and intelligence firm, shared a slowed-down analysis of the video on X, stating, “The video in question merely shows them clearing a table of a stirrer and a tissue in preparation for media photographs.”
Same playbook: The false narrative builds off long running baseless claims that Zelensky is a coke user.
Since Russia began moving troops near Ukraine’s border in December 2021 ahead of its full-scale invasion in February 2022, pro-Kremlin disinformation outlets have attempted to discredit Zelensky by labeling him as a drug addict. In a February 2022 video statement, Russian President Vladimir Putin referred to Ukraine’s government as a “gang of drug addicts.”
The false claim targeting Macron follows reports that Russia is increasingly targeting France as the French leader emerges as one of the West’s top supporters of Ukraine.
In April 2025, NewsGuard issued a report finding that a Russian influence operation Storm-1516 spread five claims targeting France from December 2024 to March 2025 that jointly generated 55.8 million views.