Russian posters showing Biden direct people to U.S. Embassy, not ‘dementia care facilities’

President Joe Biden’s detractors regularly claim that he’s mentally unfit to lead the country. But are Russian dementia care facilities using Biden to tout their services? 

"Russian dementia care facilities are using Biden on their poster," reads a screenshot of a March 11 tweet showing two posters alongside what looks like a city street.  

The posters show a photo of Biden hugging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Biden’s recent trip to Kyiv. They also feature Russian text and a phone number. 

An Instagram post sharing the screenshot was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Using Google Translate, we found a couple of loose translations of the text in the posters: "Elderly people need attention," "Call right now," and "help center for elderly dementia."

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stated on November 24, 2024 in an Instagram post

“Rachel Maddow MELTS DOWN over Elon Musk posting memes about buying MSNBC.”

But the number on the post doesn’t lead to a dementia care facility, as the tweet claims. 

Rather, it’s an emergency number that Americans in Russia can use to reach the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Russia.

We don’t know the origin of these posters, but we’ve seen similar claims before. In 2019, we fact-checked a false claim that New York City sanitation ads were insulting supporters of former President Donald Trump. In that case, the posters were not associated with the city government but were the satirical work of an unauthorized graphic artist.

Considering that the phone number on these Russian-language posters is not for a dementia care facility, as the post claimed, but for the U.S. government, we rate this post False.