Russian propaganda has been spreading the narrative that Ukraine's leadership is allegedly illegitimate for many years. Since 2014, he has been referring to President Petro Poroshenko. Still, after the start of the full-scale invasion of Russia, propagandists also claim that Volodymyr Zelensky is not the "real" president either. The last time this message was spread was by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Serhii Lavrov, in an interview with the propagandist Margarita Simonyan. "Putin told Macron: your Zelensky is the product of a coup d'état."

It is a lie. After the Revolution of Dignity of 2014, free, democratic elections have already been held in Ukraine twice - in 2014, the compliance of which was recognized by the whole world with all the norms of legislation and procedures, and in 2019 - when Volodymyr Zelensky became president, through the same elections recognized by the world. Russia itself recognized these elections as legitimate both times.

At the same time, in the Russian Federation itself, every election is the result of large-scale manipulations and violations of democratic procedures - unlike in Russia, in Ukraine, there are always representatives of the opposition at the polls, and in one case, it was the opposition candidate who became the next president.

Russian propaganda constantly uses distortions of historical facts to prove that they "have the right to Ukraine" and other countries of the former Soviet Union. But, according to their twisted logic, Putin himself is not a legitimate president: unlike Ukraine, there really was a coup in Russia in 1991, which resulted in the election of Boris Yeltsin and the subsequent coming to power of his successor, Volodymyr Putin.