Ukrainian Women Refugees Are Falsely Accused of Spiking French Divorce Rates by Having Affairs with Married Men
By Alice Lee
What happened: A Russian malign influence campaign is gaining traction with its latest absurd claim: that 64 percent of divorces in France are due to husbands cheating with Ukrainian women refugees.
A closer look: Social media users are sharing images of three purported articles by major French newspapers supposedly reporting that French men having affairs with Ukrainian refugees are the cause of 64 percent of the year’s divorces.
One image, supposedly showing a news article by French newspaper Le Figaro, stated, “In 2025 alone, more than 64% of divorces in France were caused by secret relationships between husbands and Ukrainian refugees.” The other images impersonated articles from French newspapers Libération and Le Parisien.
Multiple Telegram channels that regularly spread claims originating from the Russian influence campaign Matryoshka shared the fabricated French articles and said in Russian: “The institution of marriage in France is under threat. 64% of divorces due to infidelity are caused by husbands having affairs with Ukrainian refugees.”
Actually: The three news articles are fake, and the claim is baseless.
NewsGuard did not find any evidence of these reports in any of the three outlets’ websites or social media channels. Le Figaro deputy editorial director Benjamin Ferran told NewsGuard in a July 2025 email: “This is obviously fake. We have never published this information on our website.” Libération and Le Parisien did not respond to NewsGuard’s request for comment.
There are no credible reports about the presence of Ukrainian refugees in France leading to more divorces. NewsGuard could not find any recent studies about the causes of divorce in France.
Where it originated: The fabricated news reports match tactics used by Matryoshka, a Russian influence operation that publishes bogus reports mimicking credible Western media outlets to spread false claims about Ukraine.
NewsGuard reported in March that since 2018, our analysts had found that the Matryoshka campaign has created at least 63 videos and images impersonating reliable media organizations to advance pro-Russian falsehoods.
Russian influence campaigns have repeatedly spread false claims about Ukrainian refugees in an apparent effort to undermine support for them, particularly in countries that have welcomed many refugees since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Previous false Matryoshka narratives reported by NewsGuard include the claim that Ukrainian refugees set fire to a Polish warehouse in April 2024 and that Ukrainian refugees threw a pig’s head wrapped in a Palestinian flag through the window of a Berlin mosque in July 2024.
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