Fact File: Report about Ukraine’s President purchasing a personal bunker is false

An online post has garnered widespread attention for claiming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy spent millions of Western taxpayers’ dollars on a personal underground bunker in Nova Scotia.

The post, which has received more than a million views and thousands of shares on the social media platform X, includes a video news report with the Sun’s newspaper logo and a link to a purported Toronto Sun news article about the purported purchase.

However, no credible news sources have reported on this purchase, with an editor at the Toronto Sun and one of the owners behind the bunker’s redevelopment immediately dismissing the claim and associated content.

THE CLAIM

In an Oct. 23 post on X, a user claimed that Zelenskyy spent $42 million of taxpayers’ money from Ukraine’s Western allies on a personal 64,000-square-foot underground bunker instead of on the country’s defense.

“Western taxpayers fund the war. Zelenskyy funds a personal $42M bunker in Canada. The math only works if you stop asking where the money actually goes,” the user said. “The same man who lectures the world about Ukrainian suffering just dropped $42 million on a private nuclear bunker in Canada.”

“He begs the West for more money every month, then quietly drops $42 million on a private Canadian bunker,” the user added.

On the post’s video news report, a narrator could be heard claiming that Zelenskyy purchased the bunker from Canadian crypto mogul Jonathan Baha’i during the president’s visit to Canada in early September.

The narrator added that the bunker’s website had been shut down due to a change in ownership and showed what appeared to be a message about it. The video cited the web page source as thediefenbaker.ca.

In the linked article, the text repeated what the narrator said in the video.

The post has received more than 1.1 million views and has been shared more than 3,000 times, with many users spreading the claim and questioning Zelenskyy.

In one of the shared posts on Oct. 23, which has more than 942,000 views, the user questioned the purported purchase, asking whether the public is upset about it.

THE FACTS

The deputy editor of the Toronto Sun, Kevin Hann, says both the claim and the supporting content are fake, while the co-owner of the bunker’s redevelopment project, Paul Mansfield, dismisses the claim as “1,000 per cent fake.” Online evidence also strongly indicates there was no purchase.

Among the evidence is the absence of news media reports of the purported purchase of an underground bunker by the Ukrainian president.

Using a range of keywords, including “bunker,” “fallout shelter,” “Zelenskyy,” “Nova Scotia,” and “Diefenbaker,” in Google’s search features, no results emerged in a search between Sept. 1 and Oct. 26.

The link that is used to direct readers to the supposed Toronto Sun story and video also appears to be false. The web address in the post includes a hyphen between the words “toronto” and “sun,” while the official Toronto Sun web address — torontosun.com — does not include a hyphen.

According to the WHOIS Domain Name Lookup site, the “toronto-sun” domain was created on Oct. 15 and updated on Oct. 20, days before the user posted their claim on X on Oct. 23.

When shown the video news content featuring the Sun’s logo and the purported news article, Hann, in an email statement, described them as “fake.”

With the thediefenbaker.ca site, the WHOIS Domain Name Lookup showed that the site was also created around the same time, Oct. 16.

Both sites had the same Registrar: Go Get Canada Domain Registrar Ltd.

The bunker’s official website is thediefenbaker.com.

Mansfield said thediefenbaker.ca site does not belong to his development company, and that they are exploring options to take down the domain and transfer it to them.

The video shows an image that the narrator said was a record from the Nova Scotia land registry; a reverse image search of that image did not lead to any similar records online.

As for the building shown in the video, a reverse image search of some frames revealed it to be an old Diefenbunker at Camp Debert in Nova Scotia’s Colchester County, the same bunker that Baha’i owns and is being repurposed into luxury condominiums.

Similar images of this bunker appeared on other web pages, including news sites, TripAdvisor, and a newswire photo database, which included a photo taken by a Canadian Press photographer.

The Canadian Press published a story on Dec. 29, 2025, about the bunker’s history and transformation into a luxury fallout shelter.

This Diefenbunker, named after former Canadian prime minister John Diefenbaker, who ordered its construction at the Camp Debert military base in 1959, was one of six identical shelters built across Canada.

Located about an hour’s drive north of Halifax, the bunker has an advanced life-support system that could filter chemical, biological, and radioactive contamination and has a metre-thick wall that can withstand a five-megaton nuclear blast from two kilometres away.

It can also store enough food and water to sustain 350 government and military leaders for 90 days.

During the 1990s, these bunkers were decommissioned, with most of them either sealed off or destroyed.

A few still remain, including one used for offices, classrooms, and accommodations at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier, north of Quebec, and another in Carp, Ont., that serves as “Canada’s Cold War Museum.”

The bunker in Nova Scotia was opened for public tours in the late 1990s until Baha’i bought the building in 2012.

Following the purchase, Baha’i repurposed the building to host a secure data storage centre and began to stage public events, including laser tag, e-sports, and a Cold War-themed escape room.

However, the COVID-19 pandemic halted those activities, leaving much of the bunker idle until 2022, when Baha’i and Mansfield developed a plan to convert it into luxury condominiums. Renovations began years later in 2025.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 29, 2026.

Timon Johnson, The Canadian Press