No, Charlie Hebdo didn't publish an issue with Zelenskyy as a caricature of Quasimodo

Fake newspaper and magazine covers are a tactic often used in Russian propaganda.

Transcript

00:00No, Charlie Hebdo didn't publish an issue with Zelensky as Quasimodo.

00:09A fake version of the front cover from the French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo

00:14is doing the rounds on social media.

00:16It depicts Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelensky as Quasimodo,

00:20one of the main characters of The Hunchback of Notre Dame by French writer Victor Hugo.

00:25The headline on the alleged front cover says,

00:27What's a reopening of Notre Dame without a hunchback?

00:30referring to the reopening of the iconic Parisian Cathedral in December.

00:34Also featured in the image, a French president Emmanuel Macron

00:38shaking hands with US president-elect Donald Trump.

00:41The picture is typically shared with captions that mock Zelensky

00:44and his efforts to shore up support for Ukraine against Russia's invasion.

00:48Some say that even Charlie Hebdo has turned against Zelensky,

00:51while others claim that it shows the West is turning against the president.

00:55However, the evidence shows that the front cover is fake

00:58and suggests that it's part of Russia's propaganda campaign against Ukraine,

01:02many of the accounts sharing the image are pro-Russian accounts and media outlets.

01:07We've seen many times before that Russian propaganda uses false newspaper

01:11and magazine front covers to spread misinformation and destabilize support for a given cause.

01:17We can see that this particular cover is fake

01:19because it doesn't appear anywhere on Charlie Hebdo's website.

01:22The image contains the issue number 1690

01:25and when we search for that issue on the site, a completely different cover shows up.

01:29This one depicts caricatures of ousted Syrian president Bashar al-Assad,

01:34Russian president Vladimir Putin and Iran's supreme leader Khamenei

01:38as the three wise men from the Christmas nativity story.

01:41It intends to mock al-Assad's flight to Moscow,

01:43where he's now under Putin's protection and has nothing to do with Zelensky.

01:47We can also see that the fake cover was supposedly posted on Monday 9th December,

01:52but that can't be true because Charlie Hebdo publishes its issues on Wednesdays.