At the end of June 2023, a screenshot of a Politico article appeared on the Internet, the authors of which allegedly claim that a successful counteroffensive would require 20 million lives from Ukraine. We decided to check whether such a publication was true.

On June 28, a screenshot of a Politico magazine article headlined “20,000,000 Lives for Freedom” began circulating on the Internet. This screenshot shows a photograph of damaged Ukrainian equipment and one paragraph of text. “Given that the Ukrainian counter-offensive resulted in the loss of 16,000 soldiers killed to retake 50 km² of territory, the lives of more than 20 million soldiers will be needed to achieve the goal of retaking all territory, based on the dynamics of the fighting.” Many popular Telegram channels wrote about this article, including “Live broadcast"(812,000 views at the time of writing this analysis), "Russia now" (393,000), "Ne.Sugar"(319,000), "Dmitry Vasilets" (246,000) and "Truthfulness"(243,000).

The earliest publication of a screenshot that “Verified” was able to find appeared on June 28 at 12:40 Moscow time in the Telegram channel “Explosion point"(17,000 views). Neither there nor in later posts there was a link to the original source.

Discover on the site Politico (as well as on his website European version) such an article was not successful for any of the keywords. There is also no Research section where the material was supposedly published. Moreover, according to the word counter-offence, which is used in the distributed text to indicate a counter-offensive, there are no publications. This is because this is a gross lexical error; in English, “counter-offensive” is counteroffensive. As noted Associated Press, in the small text in the screenshot there are many other, less noticeable syntactic and lexical errors.

There are other differences from regular Politico articles. In the screenshot being distributed, the text immediately follows the photo. In Politico, publications are designed differently: after the main photo, the date and time of publication of the article, as well as the name of the author, are indicated.

Design example articles on the Politico website

Finally, major global media outlets turned directly to Politico for comment. A spokeswoman for the publication, Melissa Cook, said: Associated Pressthat Politico did not publish such an article. And her colleague Emma Krstic from the audience department in conversation with Reuters noted that this text, which is riddled with punctuation and grammatical errors, does not meet Politico's editorial standards.

Thus, the screenshot of an article supposedly from Politico magazine is fake. There is no such publication on the publication’s website, the magazine’s employees deny that they published such a note, and many errors are found in its text. In addition, recently the Ukrainian counter-offensive has become a popular plot for the authors of fake news. Since mid-May, at least six fake covers of European publications have appeared on the Internet (Titanic, Eulenspiegel, Courier International, El Jueves, Handelsblatt) with cartoons on this topic.

Cover photo: social networks, screenshot “Verified”