- After French President Emmanuel Macron said France was providing two-thirds of all intelligence to Ukraine on Jan. 15, 2026, a rumor gained traction that this was because Ukraine had given false intelligence to the U.S., which the United States then leaked to Russia, revealing the U.S. as an unreliable intelligence partner for Ukraine. The rumor continued to circulate in September 2026.
- Snopes could find no evidence confirming the rumor Ukraine had shared false information with the U.S. Instead, this part of the claim came from an apparent misunderstanding of a Jan. 16, 2026, interview on a French news television channel.
- In that interview, Vincent Crouzet — a former intelligence officer at the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), France’s foreign intelligence agency — said, without citing any sources, that Ukrainian intelligence officials suspected the U.S. had leaked information to Russia, causing Ukraine to stop sharing intelligence with the United States. In an X post two days later, Crouzet appeared to deny the claim that those leaks involved intentionally false information.
- Snopes first contacted Crouzet in January 2026 and reached out to him again in late September to ask about his evidence for these alleged leaks and whether there was any indication they involved Ukraine intentionally feeding the U.S. false information. We had not received a reply before publication but will update this story if we learn more.
In September 2026, a claim recirculated online that Ukraine had allegedly given the U.S. false intelligence that the United States then leaked to Russia, which revealed the U.S. as an unreliable intelligence partner.
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, starting a war that is ongoing as of this writing.
For example, one X user, whose post had been viewed more than 8 million times at the time of publication, wrote (archived), “France and Ukraine fed Trump false intelligence to test whether he would leak it to Putin—and he did.”
An Instagram user then posted a screenshot of that X post (archived). The caption said the claim fueled “speculation that Trump or people around his administration were leaking intelligence to Moscow,” but added that it “has not been proven.”
(X)
The rumor first spread at the start of 2026, shortly after French President Emmanuel Macron said France was providing two-thirds of Ukraine’s intelligence on Jan. 15. Social media users then suggested the reasoning behind the French-Ukrainian intelligence partnership was the alleged leak of false Ukrainian intelligence from the U.S. to Russia. Posts making the claim featured on X, Substack, Medium, Bluesky and Reddit.
Several posts, including one on Facebook (archived), featured a screenshot of a since-deleted X post by user Luc Rombout, which read:
Interesting message on French newschannel LCI:
“Ukrainian intell services sent false strategic info to US intell services… and observed that the information had been relayed to RUS and was used by RUS forces.”
=> total replacement of US as Intell partner with FRA, GBR, DEU [France, the U.K., Germany]
“Trump is leaking intelligence about our allies to Russia,” the Facebook post’s caption read.
Snopes could find no evidence confirming the rumor Ukraine had shared false information with the U.S. Instead, this claim appeared to stem from a misunderstanding of an interview that aired on Jan. 16, 2026, on the French news television channel LCI.
The interview subject was Vincent Crouzet, who formerly worked at the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), France’s foreign intelligence agency. He said in the interview, without citing his sources, that Ukrainian intelligence officials suspected the U.S. had leaked information to Russia, causing Ukraine to stop sharing intelligence with the United States.
Asked to clarify his assertion that the U.S. had leaked Ukrainian intelligence to Russia, Crouzet said in a Jan. 18, 2026, X post (archived), which in English reads, “No, I did not say that: I said Ukrainians suspected risks of information leaks from the U.S. to the Russians.”
Snopes first contacted Crouzet in January 2026 and then reached out to him again in September to ask him what evidence he could provide that Ukrainians suspected intelligence leaks from the U.S. to Russia and whether there was any reason to believe Ukraine had fed the U.S. false information. We also contacted the White House for a comment on the rumor. We will update this report if we receive any responses.
Due to the fact that we could not verify or disprove these details independently, we did not give this report a rating.
The interview that sparked the rumor
The rumor spread, in part, via the screenshot of the X post by Rombout, who identified himself on his LinkedIn page as the head of a crisis management center in Belgium.
Rombout’s post appeared to reshare a video clip posted on the 24H Pujadas account. 24H Pujadas is a program on LCI, considered reputable in France.
The clip itself was genuine and not created or altered using an artificial intelligence tool. Snopes identified an X post by the TV program 24H Pujadas with the video clip (archived) and a full video of the segment on the day it aired, Jan. 16, 2026. The presenter on that day was French journalist Yves Calvi.
Rombout seemingly deleted his original X post that made the claim. In a later post, he said in French that he was quoting the discussion in the French news program, implying that the claim did not originate with him.
A review of the televised interview showed Crouzet saying, in the context of discussing Macron’s speech announcing France was now providing two-thirds of Ukraine’s intelligence, that two Ukrainian intelligence officials had decided to stop sharing intelligence with the U.S. due to a lack of trust (emphasis ours):
So this announcement went a bit under the radar, yet it is essential. It is essential in two ways. First because it marks the divorce between Ukrainian intelligence and U.S. intelligence, because if we [France] supply two-thirds of Ukraine’s intelligence, I can well imagine that the last third is supplies by other European partners — in this case, Germany and the U.K.
When did this divorce happen? It happened on Feb. 28, 2025, during the famous session in the Oval Office, which created a break in the trust between Ukrainian intelligence and U.S. intelligence, to the point where the two leaders of Ukrainian intelligence — so, Vasyl Malyuk for the SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] and Kyrylo Budanov … you can see them on the screen … for the GUR [Main Directorate of Intelligence, military intelligence] — decided to no longer share effective intelligence they had with their U.S. partner due to U.S. leaks to Moscow.
Rombout’s X post seemingly misinterpreted some details. At no point did Crouzet say Ukraine had fed the U.S. false information and then tracked that information to Russia. We first reached out to Rombout in January and then contacted him again in September for his response to our findings about the possible translation error. We will update this report if we receive a response.
For further reading, Snopes examined a rumor spread by Russian hackers that 1.7 million Ukrainians died or went missing during the war with Russia.
