In March 2023, a cartoon that allegedly appeared on the cover of the French publication Franc-Tireur went viral on the Internet. According to the media and social networks, in the drawing the Ukrainian president is sitting on a mountain of corpses of military personnel. We checked to see if the magazine published this cover.
Messages that “a French newspaper came down hard” on Vladimir Zelensky began appearing on March 22, 2023. According to numerous publications, on the cover of the 71st issue of Franc-Tireur there was a cartoon with Zelensky sitting on a pile of corpses of Ukrainian soldiers. At the same time, the politician is holding binoculars in his hands, in the lenses of which the flags of the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China are reflected. In some publications the meaning of the picture explain So: the President of Ukraine is more concerned about the alliance between Russia and China than about the losses of his army. There is also an inscription to the right of the caricature, which in most posts transferred like this: “The king of the wrong mountain. What can we expect from the alliance between Moscow and Beijing?” According to the Telegram channel “Tsargrad TV"(26,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), on the cover it is written: "King of the Moorish Mountain."
Websites wrote about the allegedly published cover of the French edition:Moscow region today", "Arguments of the week", "Mriya", News-kiev.ru, as well as the Kherson edition "Constantinople“, where they noted: “The material that adorns the caricature talks about war crimes of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the internal situation in the Ukrainian state.” In addition, the cover was shown in Telegram channels Voblya (163,000 views), "Uncle Slava"(150,000), "Sheikh Tamir"(146,000), Fox News Russia (106,000), "From the scene"(96,000), "Boiling water"(58,000), TarikNezalejko (49,000) and "Nikita Mikhalkov on Telegram"(44,000), on VKontakte (examples here, here And here) and Twitter (here, here And here).
Franc-Tireur is founded in 2021, a French political weekly that describes itself as “an intellectual and journalistic tool for the fight against progressive obscurantism.” Latest issues of the publication come out on Wednesdays, but at the bottom of the viral cover with Zelensky, March 21, 2023 (Tuesday) is indicated, with the word mercredi nearby, which means “Wednesday” in French.
"Verified" studied the official accounts of Franc-Tireur in Twitter, Facebook* And Instagram* and did not find the cartoon we were interested in there. There is no cover with Zelensky on a mountain of corpses and in archive on the newspaper’s website (at the time of writing this text, all issues from No. 13 to No. 72 are available there, and the rest can be found on social networks or third-party databases French periodical press). Moreover, a different cover of the 71st issue for March 22 has been published on all Franc-Tireur resources, announced the day before. It depicts a French television and radio presenter Cyril Hanouna, and the inscription next to it reads: “It makes me sick. Conspiracy theories and trivialization of extremes... The danger of Hanunah.” Main article of the issue represents constitutes a kind of dossier on this presenter. It is noteworthy that in November 2022, the authors of pro-government Russian Telegram channels accepted for Zelensky Hanunah, depicted in a caricature from the cover of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
It is significant that starting from the 71st issue, the publication stopped putting the serial number in the upper right corner of the cover, but moved it to the lower part - in the same place where the date is indicated.
In addition, the font in which the number 71 is written is different from the one used by the publication on all covers.
The caricature with Zelensky is signed with his name Kianusha Ramezani is an Iranian artist who has lived in France since 2009 and collaborated with Franc-Tireu. “Verified” found Ramezani’s Twitter - as it turned out, he had already seen the cover with Zelensky in one of the posts and in replays wrote: “You put my signature on a lame drawing! This is outrageous! I reported this tweet. I am not the author of this nonsense." We asked the artist if the fake was based on any of his works, to which Ramezani replied: “This is a completely different style, and I don’t have a single drawing similar to this one. They forged everything and inserted my signature!”
The earliest appearance of a counterfeit that Verified was able to track was took place March 22 at 13:20 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Postovoy” (8000 views), where the day before for the first time posted fake cover of American Newsweek magazine with Zelensky watching recent events on TV negotiations Russia and China.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook and Instagram, is an extremist organization; its activities in Russia are prohibited.
Cover photo: social networks
Fake
- Is it true that the German magazine Eulenspiegel published a cover dedicated to the influence of LGBT people and Ukraine on the upcoming Olympics?
- Is it true that the Polish magazine Polityka published a cover with rats that sank along with a submarine in the colors of the Ukrainian flag?
- Is it true that the satirical magazine Humor Times released a cover with Zelensky as a locust eating money?
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