You're reading: Man who drove truck into George Floyd protest not Ukrainian soldier

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include information about the Minnesota authorities’ understanding of Vechirko’s motives that emerged after publication.

As protests over the murder of African-American George Floyd by a white police officer raged across the United States on May 31, a tanker truck sped into a crowd of demonstrators on a bridge in Minneapolis, the city where Floyd was killed and the demonstrations first erupted.

Although all the protesters managed to jump out of the way and no one was hurt, demonstrators pulled the driver from the truck and police took him into custody.

Later that day, local media reported that the driver was 35-year-old Bogdan Vechirko. They also published his mugshots.

Soon, information appeared online that Vechirko had donated $100 to President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in October. This would feed the narrative that he had tried to plow into the protesters for political reasons. (Minnesota authorities would later deny that, suggesting Vechirko had not known the bridge where the protesters had gathered was closed, according to the Star Tribune).

But then something unexpected happened. Twitter accounts began sharing photos of a Ukrainian soldier named Bogdan Vechirko found on social media. They suggested he was the truck driver in Minneapolis.

 

The next day in Ukraine, former Ukrainian lawmaker Ihor Mosiychuk published a post on Facebook titled “Freedom for Bogdan Vechirko.” In it, he claimed that Vechirko was an American citizen born in Ukraine who had served in the Ukrainian armed forces. He called on Ukrainians around the world to “unite irrespective of political views and demand the immediate release” of Vechirko.

But there was one problem: While the truck driver and the Ukrainian soldier may share a name, they appear to be two different people.

Using open source investigation tools, the Kyiv Post looked into the identity of the Ukrainian soldier. The soldier appears to be more than a decade younger than the Vechirko in Minneapolis and bears little resemblance to the truck driver.

Social media search

The photographs of soldier Vechirko that circulated on Twitter were taken from the Facebook account of an individual named Bogdan Vechirko. That account was later deleted or suspended. 

However, the Kyiv Post plugged them into FindClone.ru, a site that matches images to users of VKontakte, a Russian social network site that has been blocked in Ukraine since 2017, but that nonetheless remains popular.

In previous investigations, the Kyiv Post has found FindClone to be highly accurate.

All the photos of soldier Vechirko led the Kyiv Post to the account of one Ukrainian, whose given name was Bodgan. The individual used a different surname on VKontakte, but had several friends with the surname Vechirko — possibly relatives. To protect the privacy of this individual, the Kyiv Post is not publishing his surname from VKontakte.

The Kyiv Post reached out to this Bogdan for comment over VKontakte, but has not yet received a response.

The Kyiv Post also located the Ukrainian Bogdan’s account on Odnoklassniki, another blocked Russian social network. Both accounts appear to have been dormant since 2018.

According to these accounts, Bogdan the soldier was born in 1998, making him 22 — or roughly 14 years younger than the suspect in Minneapolis. Biographical details from both social media sites appear to tie him to the city of Nemyriv in Ukraine’s Vinnytsia Oblast. Nothing in these accounts suggests that the man relocated, or even traveled, to the U.S.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a Twitter user published an image of what appeared to be American Bogdan Vechirko’s high school yearbook. She wrote that her best friend went to high school with Vechirko and suggested he had graduated in 2003.

The Kyiv Post could not confirm the authenticity of the yearbook photo. However, the student depicted in the yearbook photo and listed as Bogdan Vechirko resembles the Minneapolis suspect. 

Besides the results of the FindClone search, the two Bogdans appear visually different. The suspect in Minnesota has dark hair and a widow’s peak. The other Bogdan has sandy-blonde hair.

However, in many of the photos shared on Twitter, the Ukrainian Bogdan’s head was either shaved or he was wearing a beanie, and his hair was not visible. This made it less obvious that he was not the truck driver.

Politics

In some of the Twitter posts featuring the younger Bogdan’s photos, users claimed that he was Russian or a Ukrainian Nazi. Users who identified him as Russian were likely suggesting that he was a Kremlin provocateur.

Earlier, Susan Rice, formerly an advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama, claimed that the rioting across the U.S. was “right out of the Russian playbook.” She provided no concrete evidence of Russian involvement in the protests. 

Those who called Bogdan Vechirko a Ukrainian Nazi were likely responding to reports of white nationalist provocateurs joining into the unrest. 

On his VKontakte profile, soldier Bogdan described his political views as “moderate.” One of his photos was a meme that featured the words “Death to Enemies” and a Celtic Cross, a sign that the Anti-Defamation League describes as a common white supremacist symbol. However, the image appeared to be a fairly generic Ukrainian nationalist meme.

Mosiychuk, the ex-lawmaker who called for Verchirko’s release, is a former deputy commander of the Azov Battalion, a far-right Ukrainian military force. In his post, he presented the truck driver as a Trump supporter who was simply trying to cross a bridge that had been blocked by Antifa and Black Panther party members.

Trump has blamed Antifa, an informal and leaderless anti-fascist group, for the unrest across the United States. On May 31, Trump wrote on Twitter that the U.S. would declare Antifa a terrorist group.

The Kyiv Post asked Mosiychuk how he knew that the Vechirko in Minneapolis was the same person as the Ukrainian soldier.

The Ukrainian ex-lawmaker claimed he “knows people who know him,” but would not know for sure whether it was the same person until later in the day when he would have “contact with Washington.” That didn’t stop him from publishing the call to free Vechirko.